Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed

dipfan writes "Great piece in today's Financial Times on the surprising survival of mainframes - but the problem in the US is finding experienced techies to run them: "55 per cent were over 50, compared with fewer than 10 per cent of those with Unix or Windows NT server skills." Cobol programers, still needed for legacy applications, are mostly in their 40s. Help is on the way, though, thanks to IBM's use of Linux, which "freshens the labor pool" according to the article." (See also this earlier post on the mainframe-operator labor pool.)

in other news

[The Clockwork Troll]

Demand for typewriter repairmen and milk delivery personnel is also on the decline.

We should take immediate action

[Anonymous Coward]

Find the remaining Maimframe Techies and lock them in to zoos. Females will be extra rare, so we'll have to rotate them around for breeding to build up the population. It's time to end the slaughter of Mainframe Techies.

Mainframe operation 101

[Space Coyote]

"Come on, Emma"

*hit with broom*

That's all you need to know.

A question...

[zutroy]

What the hell is a "mainframe"?

Let me get this right...

[tamnir]

I have learnt Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby and what not... But noooooo! Today, you must know Cobol to get a job!

Darn, I was just starting to get working on my Fortran...

Re:A question...

[phorm]

Joke or serious question?

A very large "computer" (some are more comparable nowadays to an advanced calculator) to which remote terminals connect in order to function. In short, big ugly was-once-super-powerful computer that is the master of a network or portion thereof.

Look for something like a big box with lots of wires, maybe some tapes attached, a little rust on the side, and a weeping IT admin beside it.

Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this

[Elpacoloco]

Us younger people don't have mainframes to play with. I'm 22 and I have never ever seen a mainframe. Anywhere. I don't even know what kind of software or operating system they have. Other than they might have a cobol compiler.

I can code cobol. But I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a sharp stick.

Re:No place to experience/learn

[Angry White Guy]

I actually have an old IBM system 38 at one of the buildings that my company owns. It's still there because we can't get it out without destroying the building. I'll let it go cheap :)

Re:Not too surprising really

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that you mean Fred Brooks. Unless he has a brother named Rick that wrote an identically titled book.

Help Wanted

[American AC in Paris]

Mainframe? Pah!

Mainframe Techies are a dime a dozen--the real challenge is finding competent PDP8/E techies these days!

Plunk your modern so-called "computer whiz" in front of one, and their first reaction is invariably one of the following:

1. "Why are there so many power switches?"
2. "Where's the keyboard?"
3. "Where's the monitor?"
4. "Where's the mouse?"
5. "Why does it sound like it's about to generate lift?"
6. "Does it support themes?"
7. "Let's see...'HCF' instruction? Hwa? Oh, I get it--Hardware ConFiguration!" *click* AIEEEEEEEEE!
8. "'Switch Register'? Sorry, I never register anything. It's a government ploy to learn my phone number and address!"

Re:Let me get this right...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I have learnt Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby and what not... But noooooo! Today, you must know Cobol to get a job!

Maybe it was the edumacation section of your resume that costed you the jobs...

Re:Heavily Sarcastic reasoning for this

[repetty]

"I'm 22 and I have never ever seen a mainframe."

I think you just made an insightful observation.

At 22 you ain't done shit yet.

--Richard

I Eat Dill Pickles

[Mouth of Sauron]

Commence Freaking. Thanks.

Re:Help Wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

HCF - Halt and Catch Fire
MLD - Move and Lose Data
RST - Read and Stretch Tape
CVR - Convert to Roman Numerals...

This is so true!

[BobBoring]

I started as a "tape ape" in the 1970's. We had several pieces of equipment with numbered outlines of hands or feet. The SOP was hit/kick this item in the location of the hand/foot print if it gave the specified error number.

I remember the wonder of getting our first horizontal autoloading nine-track tape. It had a high density of 1600 bpi.

How to Tell a Mainframe Techie

[AtariAmarok]

10. They are those nice 80 year old men in the clean white coats...

9. "If you can't submit the program in batch mode, it just ain't worth submitting"

8. They're the guys with spot welders in their briefcase.

7. Compared to what they are used to, any PC or Mac is a portable computer

6. They know EBDIC, but to them edlin is a newfangled thing.

5. They know DB. They don't know Debian

4. They don't trust any machine under 3000 lbs.

3. They come home from a hard day's work with hands covered in soot and burnt oil.

2. The telltale COBOL on the resume

1. They knew all about dangling chads and punch cards without having to read Slate

Re:Or...

[Brummund]

As a Solaris user, I can say that a lot of the internals are the same. Except, of course, that all the non-gnu versions of software suck compared to their Linux equivalents.

Tell me about it. :-) A few weeks ago I was to install my app on a Solaris box. The clueful admins obviously didn't like to waste precious disk space on utilities not really necessary, and of course Sun's tar barfed on my GNU tar archives etc. After some time, I found the magic -i switch (I think it was), and was ready to deploy my app.

When I had deployed it and started testing, the app seemed to have a problem connecting to another host on the network. So, I
jumped into /bin/sh (why waste space on GNU bash?) and typed

$ ping hostname
sh: ping: not found

(And no, it wasn't a problem with PATH) :-)

Re:A question...

[number6x]

According to the Devil's IT Dictionary [isham-research.com]:

mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.

pretty accurate.

Ugh: T-Rex?

[Ted Stoner]

I am constantly being ribbed by a younger guy here about being an old ex-mainframe guy. He is always going on about how there were dinosaurs crawling about when I was programming on them. Now IBM comes out with a new model called "T-Rex". I can feel a new verbal assault coming on ...

Couldn't IBM have call it something like Mainframe Extreme or something a bit more trendy?

Re:Legacy

[bobKali]

NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door

Yup, I first heard that back in 1981. Given enough time I'm sure that will be true. Of course, given enough time a room full of Eminems with tape recorders could eventually record some music.

Cobol?

[Mithrilhall]

Sweet! Those Cobol classes I had to take over the last two semesters are finally going to pay off!

Re:How to Tell a Mainframe Techie

[Rick.C]

10) They view a PC/MAC as a dumb terminal "with this neat copy/paste thingie."

9) They know EBCDIC and are totally annoyed that numbers sort before letters in ASCII.

8) They are also annoyed that PC keyboards use the new-line key as ENTER.

7) "Fiber optic cable" means a 36-pair trunk. Anything less is just a device jumper.

6) They think that less than eight fiber paths to any device constitutes an I/O bottleneck.

5) They laugh at COBOL programmers. To their faces.

4) The largest program they ever wrote was 12K. The coolest was 160 bytes.

3) They know what the "National" character set is.

2) They wince at a 1.2-million line core dump, but they're glad they don't have to print it like they did in the old days.

1) They can read that core dump like it was source code.

Re:Employers' fault...

[LePrince]

Hire me ! I have plenty of experience with RPG. I finished Final Fantasy 1 to 3, 7 to 10, and I promise I'll do my best while working for you to finish the new releases on time. I also have good experience with Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire, 7th Saga, Zelda, and many others...

Oh, not THAT kind of RPG... ;-)

Re:Advising a High School Student

[sql*kitten]

What path would a kid take to get into real datacenter hardware?

Go work for Unisys, IBM, CSC or EDS. Volunteer for the mainframes - there probably won't be much competition. Your colleagues will laugh at you, and tell you all about their "hot" Java skills. Quit after 5 years and become a contractor. Laugh at your former colleagues who're discovering that their skills are a cheap commodity now.

You're wrong, d00d

[sql*kitten]

Were you to try to do ANYTHING with a mainframe (I'm thinking s/390 or z/OS here) armed with the knowledge you mentioned you would be so horribly lost it wouldn't even be funny.

Actually, it would be funny ;-)

Old Bastard Sysadmins

[thogard]

Years ago I worked for a group that ran a bunch of systems that didn't fit in with anything else in the MIS department. One of the systems was a very old IBM 3081. This thing had water cooling and boxes and boxes of storage devices. It was a serious bit of big iron.

Sometime in 1993 we had meetings where the clueless manager would ask us the uptime so should could put it on her report. Our group would report the different servers we ran with a 50 to 100 day uptime but the old guy who ran the 3081 would claim 4767 days or 13 years or 17 billion microseconds depending on the week.

At some point we were told everyone was going through "team training" and we were the second group scheduled. We made the people running the team training cry and the had to postpone it for a few days while they could collect their thoughts (and feelings?) A second revolt was led by the Old Bastard Sysadmin at teh mention of a group hug.

At the time I had been doign sysadmin work for 8 years but the Old Bastard Sysadmin taught me some of the finer points of being a BOFH.

Re:Employers' fault...

[BrokenHalo]

Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed

I'm not quite dead, you insensitive clod :-)