Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap • Hacker News Board

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#21

Post by throwaway713824 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #18

marktangotango wrote: post #12

Mainframe skills shortage is a complete fabrication, it simply doesn’t exist. In June of this year a local company laid off 850 people, a company with a large mainframe installation (SS&C formerly DST Systems). Hundreds were mainframe programmers. This is after a decade offshoring. There are thousands of former mainframers here. And this is just in Kansas City, Mo. Anecdotal but representative I believe. Mainframes a…

I'm not sure if your argument supports your conclusion: 1) You mentioned layoffs, but you didn't mention how long it took those people to find new jobs. 2) For those who couldn't find new jobs, how many of them avoided interviews or job offers because they were unwilling to relocate? 3) How transferable are "mainframe" skills to other "mainframe" installations? (As a non-mainframe-programmer, I have no idea how much…

The conclusion that there are many former mainframe developers who no longer work as mainframe developers in the US might be anecdotal but fits what I've seen in the Chicago market as well.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#22

Post by actsasbuffoon » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

Do we need to bridge the gap? Or, to be brutally direct: Do mainframes deserve to survive in the coming decades?

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#23

Post by DannyB2 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #22

Do we need to bridge the gap? Or, to be brutally direct: Do mainframes deserve to survive in the coming decades?

Another question to ASCII is whether millennials can learn EBCDIC.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#24

Post by hathawsh » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #19

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if your argument supports your conclusion: 1) You mentioned layoffs, but you didn't mention how long it took those people to find new jobs. 2) For those who couldn't find new jobs, how many of them avoided interviews or job offers because they were unwilling to relocate? 3) How transferable are "mainframe" skills to other "mainframe" installations? (As a non-mainframe-programmer, I have no idea how much…

FWIW, a couple of years back I had a gentleman who was a 30 year mainframe programmer in a Rails & Postgres class that I taught. He learned both, was humble enough to take an internship for a Rails job at over 50 and then turned it into full employment. Anecdotal, but I found it interesting to watch the portability of experience.

IMHO the key is your student has programming skills mixed with humility. When I'm hiring, that's all I'm really looking for, and I think that's true for most coding jobs, mainframe or not.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#25

Post by e5india » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:36 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #12

Mainframe skills shortage is a complete fabrication, it simply doesn’t exist. In June of this year a local company laid off 850 people, a company with a large mainframe installation (SS&C formerly DST Systems). Hundreds were mainframe programmers. This is after a decade offshoring. There are thousands of former mainframers here. And this is just in Kansas City, Mo. Anecdotal but representative I believe. Mainframes a…

Your comment made me curious and I ended up finding a great article on the story behind the layoffs at SS&C.

https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature-story/article/210195...

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#26

Post by aleksei » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #22

Do we need to bridge the gap? Or, to be brutally direct: Do mainframes deserve to survive in the coming decades?

To be brutally direct, why do you think mainframes should not survive "in the coming decades"?

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#27

Post by kibwen » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

My first professional job was to write RPG for an AS/400 mainframe (or whatever it's called these days), and even I don't know what the word "mainframe" is supposed to suggest to the modern user. As far as I could tell, it was just a single bog-standard server rack (amusingly sitting alone in a room that was far, far too big for it; a reminder of the massive bank of computers that used to do the same job) whose only interface was a green-and-black 80x24 IBM terminal emulator speaking a bespoke telnet dialect, and where nothing on the system was textual so you could only use first-party tools to modify the system (conspicuously lacking any support for source control). And I ain't a greybeard, this was in 2011! And the thing was dog slow; I took a batch job that spent hours running every night, ported it to PHP (forcing it to make database requests over the intranet now), and saw the runtime fall to minutes. I estimate that the company paid around $40,000 annually for the privilege of using it. IBM must have the best salespeople in the entire world.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#28

Post by natvert » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am a millennial.... Question: what is a mainframe and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but inelastic, compute resource. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to use something horizontally scalable instead?

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#29

Post by ownagefool » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

nulagrithom wrote: post #14

wolfgke wrote: post #2

My recommendations: - Give lots of young people the opportunity to learn the necessary mainframe skills (ideally by themselves). Lots of today's great programmers learned their programming skills on their own. This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them. - Pay really good salaries and advertise it. Money nearly always has a huge attractive force.

> This is very hard to do for mainframes because of access to them. Bingo. I work in an AS/400 shop. I simply can't invest myself personally in the work because I know my access to that environment is predicated on working for this particular company. I can hone my Linux skills and even my Windows Server skills any time. I can bring it home. I can use it myself. I can own it. I can't do that with the AS/400. Just spi…

Pretty much this. I basically steer my clients to free software, simply because they can hire people with experience in it because people can learn it easily in their free time.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#30

Post by monocasa » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #27

My first professional job was to write RPG for an AS/400 mainframe (or whatever it's called these days), and even I don't know what the word "mainframe" is supposed to suggest to the modern user. As far as I could tell, it was just a single bog-standard server rack (amusingly sitting alone in a room that was far, far too big for it; a reminder of the massive bank of computers that used to do the same job) whose only…

AS/400 is more a minicomputer. The line was developed specifically to take on the DECs and Data Generals that were starting to appear in businesses.