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Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

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Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#91

Post by Someone »

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…

http://www.timeshare400.com. Starts at $15/month.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#92

Post by StillBored »

I tend to think the mainframe shortages are the result of a culture that views mainframe "operators" and "system programmers" as nearly minimum wage unskilled jobs until someone has 40 years of experience.

But what really gets me is that tapeless mainframe backup solution abound. Though they tend to fall into two categories. The ones that require code changes in legacy applications that are using tape as hierarchical storage. And the pile of virtual tape solutions (like this one https://tributary.com/storage-director-2/) which appear as tapes on the mainframe and dump the data to alternate sources disk/AWS-S3/whatever.

I guess there is a 3rd "transparent" set of methods that basically back-up/snapshot individual volumes outside of the applications. Either way, their page could do a better job contrasting their product with existing backup solutions.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#93

Post by racingmars »

lovich wrote: post #83
lovich wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulations seem to be one reason. The IBM mainframes use their own implementation of floating point math that appears to be legally required for some businesses as you can see under "Special Uses" here[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_hexadecimal_floating_poi...

Was there a reason this was downvoted? I thought this was a factual statement, but I'm not very well versed in the mainframe world so I'd appreciate it if someone could point out what I said that was incorrect

I don't know why the downvotes since it's an interesting tidbit of info... but looking at the Wikipedia page, it's not that you are legally required to do all of your processing using the IBM hex format in your floating point calculations, it's just that when you submit your data set to the FDA the file format they specify uses the IBM hex floating point format as the data type for one of the fields. So you can convert at submission time (and, indeed, it looks like the FDA even provides code to help you convert if the data isn't coming from a mainframe with native support for the format).

And the other examples under Special Uses... like the GRIB data, I have toyed with reading weather model data and I just write Go code that reads the files and does conversions as necessary on x86 without having to involve a mainframe. (Although that said, I have an odd fascination with mainframes despite never using them professionally, and maintain a system using the Hercules emulator and the MVS 3.8 operating system, which was the last freely-available version of what became today's z/OS.)

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#94

Post by ASalazarMX »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #57
ASalazarMX wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. A long-term job is indispensable for this kind of programming. Since the tooling is very stable and backwards compatible, you can get really good at it. Now if you get laid off after 5 years of doing just that, you better find another mainframe job because your resume won't look as diverse. OTOH, body-farming consultancies are excellent for networking and finding a full time job.

For finding a job at a crappy company, because those are the ones that hire bodyshops.

YMMV, it worked fine for me.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#95

Post by boon »

eikenberry wrote: post #73
TomK32 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was worth reading. capitalism's fixation on quarterly reports is ruining successful companies like DST.

That's not capitalism, it's our culture around capitalism. There is nothing inherent to capitalism that stresses short term growth vs. long term growth. For example much of the push for short term growth comes from the stock market, but the stock market (or public ownership at all) is in no way required for capitalism to work (and IMO it would probably be better without it).

It's the government's requirements for filing 10-Ks and 10-Qs that generate this type of behavior. Plenty of examples out there where capital-raising efforts, and therefore investment decisions are stymied by markets that are driven by quarterly government reporting.

Some companies have been able to fight it off and really put long-term profitability into place (Apple seems like a reasonable example of this), but it is the exception, not the rule, and many times does not last long.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#97

Post by StillBored »

TomK32 wrote: post #55
e5india wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That was worth reading. capitalism's fixation on quarterly reports is ruining successful companies like DST.

Do the terms asset stripping or corporate raider mean anything anymore?

In the 70's and 80's lots of todays big names made a fortune buying controlling shares of companies that had spent decades reducing their overheads buy buying (instead of leasing) their corp offices, factory machines, etc until the value of the real assets were greater than the stock value. Then all the assets were sold off, and leased back, with shorterm sweetheart deals that lasted just long enough for the raider to sell the resulting company to someone else (or simply in some cases shut it down).

Wall street has long sense stopped serving anyone but themselves. Its long past due for many of their activities to be made illegal.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#98

Post by tambourine_man »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #52
natvert wrote: post #28

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?

You want a mainframe if you want your system designed by engineers and not web developers. The IBM mainframe system is called "Z" for zero downtime. Banks and Airlines use systems that haven't needed to be rebooted in decades. (This is a little oversold, but that's the selling point.)

Banks and Airline systems go offline all the freaking time.

Just the other day I told the post office attendant their system was back online, as the cursor started blinking again. Telltale sign of mainframe style computing.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#99

Post by dfox »

petra wrote: post #82
dfox wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want mainframe in similar situations as when you need EC2 ridiculously large instances. That is when you have workload that absolutely most run as a whole on one big single machine. Typically that means OLTP database which cannot work with some relaxed consistency model (payment settlement is often cited example of such thing). And for the elasticity part, mainframes are where the whole virtualization and hypervi…

Given that Intel leads cpu performance, How can mainframes be that much better at single node performance than x86 servers ?

Intel leads in x86 performance and comparing performance of System z CPU to x86 is not exactly trivial task as zArchitecture is "uber-CISC" with instructions like "give me SHA256 of this part of memory" that also typically runs on 4+GHz clocks (and the "CPU book" has TDP of several kW). But main part of the performance advantage (be it perceived or real) is incredible memory and IO bandwith combined with large caches and hardware offload for essentially anything that remotely looks like IO.

On the other hand, you can get rack-mount x86 server with several TB of RAM for fraction of price of mainframe which is exactly the hardware for new applications that would otherwise be best served by mainframe.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#100

Post by e12e »

Roboprog wrote: post #86
petra wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Intel leads cpu performance, How can mainframes be that much better at single node performance than x86 servers ?

Data bandwidth probably

Bandwidth and reliability. It's in general hard to swap out cpus while running db transactions on commodity x86 hw.
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