It is not surprising that Marist is trying to recruit more help, they could probably use it. So could anyone else who has a mainframe these days. Marist was actually one of the first mainframes to ever run linux. They have extremely close ties to IBM, though it seems recently its become much closer. Hence the need to recruit. As IBM deploys more and more linux-frames they are probably running short on people who can manage it; young people that is.
I was actually one of the lucky college students chosen to become a mainframe operator at Marist. I must say the system never went down during my time there. It is quite a system to see running though I would not want to do it for the rest of my life. The linux console as well as countlesss other systems just sat there and spit out audit trails as we ran simple check programs to make sure the system was up and running correclty. I think that one of the biggest reasons is the complexity. Coming from a Windows/Linux background it was extremely difficult understanding what was going on and frightening to see old school terminals. Oh yes I played with MVS,OS3,JES and countless other 3 letter acronyms and to be honest I cannot remember what any of it was for and that was 2 years ago. As a student looking to the future you immediately think of the past and no future when you see the terminals staring at you. Then you look upstairs at the type of people working there, friendly as they were, and thank god that your making more money then the rest of the financial aid workers and goto the bar every night.
As a student operator you were give a large manual as well as checklists on what checks must be run on systems during the day. There were basically custom manuals for everything and they were all out of date. The biggest running joke was the fact that they were trying to have the student operators update the manual, but no one knew what any of the commands they typed did. I would say I was one of the most competent operator's there and I never once thought of getting sucked into working as a programmer for the schoole, or continuing as an operator regardless of the pay. Not that it was any good anyway. In fact, no one did. Not a single person had any interest what so ever in working with there after college.
In short the reason that they don't have enough people is that even the people who do get exposure to them don't want to run them. Any one of us could have been hired immediately after college to work on any part of the system but everyone left and went home to look for other jobs, probably at the local diner.
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It is not surprising that Marist is trying to recruit more help, they could probably use it. So could anyone else who has a mainframe these days. Marist was actually one of the first mainframes to ever run linux. They have extremely close ties to IBM, though it seems recently its become much closer. Hence the need to recruit. As IBM deploys more and more linux-frames they are probably running short on people who can manage it; young people that is.
I was actually one of the lucky college students chosen to become a mainframe operator at Marist. I must say the system never went down during my time there. It is quite a system to see running though I would not want to do it for the rest of my life. The linux console as well as countlesss other systems just sat there and spit out audit trails as we ran simple check programs to make sure the system was up and running correclty. I think that one of the biggest reasons is the complexity. Coming from a Windows/Linux background it was extremely difficult understanding what was going on and frightening to see old school terminals. Oh yes I played with MVS,OS3,JES and countless other 3 letter acronyms and to be honest I cannot remember what any of it was for and that was 2 years ago. As a student looking to the future you immediately think of the past and no future when you see the terminals staring at you. Then you look upstairs at the type of people working there, friendly as they were, and thank god that your making more money then the rest of the financial aid workers and goto the bar every night.
As a student operator you were give a large manual as well as checklists on what checks must be run on systems during the day. There were basically custom manuals for everything and they were all out of date. The biggest running joke was the fact that they were trying to have the student operators update the manual, but no one knew what any of the commands they typed did. I would say I was one of the most competent operator's there and I never once thought of getting sucked into working as a programmer for the schoole, or continuing as an operator regardless of the pay. Not that it was any good anyway. In fact, no one did. Not a single person had any interest what so ever in working with there after college.
In short the reason that they don't have enough people is that even the people who do get exposure to them don't want to run them. Any one of us could have been hired immediately after college to work on any part of the system but everyone left and went home to look for other jobs, probably at the local diner.