Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 44 posts

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#11

Post by trhway »

neilv wrote: post #6
pram wrote: post #2

“32 percent of organizations with a mainframe hired 11–20 mainframe related roles last year, while 35 percent filled more than 20 positions.” This doesn’t sound like a whole lot.

Yeah, I'm also curious how many total jobs this is. And also what the pay is. These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs. To solve the talent deficit, they could say " We pay like FAANG . And if you do serious work, we expect stable jobs and steady career progression for at least 20 more years." Fund it by investing some of the wealth where it needs to be i…

>These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs.

the jobs are cost centers at those places while at FAANG it is main R&D, areas of investment, and thus very different treatment by the management, incl. compensation.

One can also wonder how long before LLM would replace the [most of the job of] sysadm of mainframe. I'm pretty sure that the management at those companies would jump at the mere perception of the opportunity to shave a bit of cost like they did with outsourcing.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#12

Post by rafaelturk »

All the Pain an unclear future of the mainframe is IBM's fault. Its insanely closed ecosystem, from hardwar do software. No one other than IBM has access to it. Seems to me that going further not even IBM team will know how to manage.

Once market builds an interesting compelling offer to mainframe, enterprises will leave IBM as fast as possible.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#13

Post by toomuchtodo »

trhway wrote: post #11
neilv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm also curious how many total jobs this is. And also what the pay is. These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs. To solve the talent deficit, they could say " We pay like FAANG . And if you do serious work, we expect stable jobs and steady career progression for at least 20 more years." Fund it by investing some of the wealth where it needs to be i…

>These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs. the jobs are cost centers at those places while at FAANG it is main R&D, areas of investment, and thus very different treatment by the management, incl. compensation. One can also wonder how long before LLM would replace the [most of the job of] sysadm of mainframe. I'm pretty sure that the management at those co…

There are active efforts at IBM to market generative AI to rewrite mainframe code (COBOL->Java). Orgs are desperate for cheap mainframe folks to bridge the gap until they get off of mainframes while most of this skilled workforce is retiring, but the comp and work arrangement quality is likely subpar for a job orgs are actively attempting to eliminate. If you’re close to retirement and have the skills, it’s a fine way to ride into the sunset, but if you’re younger, run away. It’s a trap.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx-code-assistant-4z/1.1?to...

(Have had to sit in meetings on this topic)

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#14

Post by gnum4n »

neilv wrote: post #6
pram wrote: post #2

“32 percent of organizations with a mainframe hired 11–20 mainframe related roles last year, while 35 percent filled more than 20 positions.” This doesn’t sound like a whole lot.

Yeah, I'm also curious how many total jobs this is. And also what the pay is. These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs. To solve the talent deficit, they could say " We pay like FAANG . And if you do serious work, we expect stable jobs and steady career progression for at least 20 more years." Fund it by investing some of the wealth where it needs to be i…

As a former P-series/AIX specialist, I can say that the pay is not as good as a decent linux job, and the career growth potential is very low. Your career options are basically to maintain legacy systems until they can figure out how to migrate it all to linux.

And if you get laid off (happens a lot at IBM lately), your career prospects are to either wait for someone to retire/die or learn linux.

No matter how important they say maintaining the legacy systems is, the pay is low enough to easily convince people to take any other IT career path.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#15

Post by webwanderings »

In around 2015 or so, prior to social media, etc, there used to be a mainframe forum or two (perhaps they still exist) where a whole bunch of newbies from India used to hang out, to learn and grow their mainframe skills. It is the same time when there were stories floating around of mainframe veterans being let go. People have short term memory issues.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#17

Post by tambourine_man »

webwanderings wrote: post #15

In around 2015 or so, prior to social media, etc, there used to be a mainframe forum or two (perhaps they still exist) where a whole bunch of newbies from India used to hang out, to learn and grow their mainframe skills. It is the same time when there were stories floating around of mainframe veterans being let go. People have short term memory issues.

2015 is prior to social media?

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#18

Post by gnum4n »

CanaryLayout wrote: post #3

If IBM weren't hostile to the Hercules project and allowed local licensing to run z/OS, CICS, IMS and DB2 on it, perhaps more hobbyists would want to careerpath themselves on to the s390 architecture. I do love the s390 arch and the massive IO hardware over there, but IBM has paywalled down entry so hard that there is no audience. They even went to the trouble of making Go binaries transportable for direct execution…

Former P-series/AIX SME here. I agree 100%. IBM's training programs are a joke.

P-series and mainframe machines have a lot of cool tech, and they're very resilient. They can even lose a CPU or some RAM and keep running. x86 systems would more likely freeze/crash immediately.

But the only reason I know P-series/AIX at all is because one small branch of IBM hired me for my linux skills back in 2011, and I learned on the job. But I quit after 5 years, because the pay wasn't sustainable. The machines are too expensive to play around with otherwise. If you learn by doing (which seems vital to be a good sysadmin or programmer), even a license to use AIX is out of the hobbyist's price range. Training courses are limited lab environments. You won't get nearly as much out of that as you would from a 12-month AWS subscription, or a $5/month VPS, or an x86 virtual machine, or a raspberry pi. etc, etc.

And IBM ended their developer machine licensing. So now employers can't even afford to maintain extra P-series machines for devs/sysadmins to play around with and learn.

But don't worry, IBM will keep shooting their feet off until they no longer exist. There will likely be a panic, similar to Y2K, where everyone's feverishly re-writing and porting and emulating and migrating things off of IBM iron and onto x86 machines.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#19

Post by _mlbt »

diego_moita wrote: post #16

Interesting that the article says nothing about salaries and available positions. And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. Young people are smarter than going aboard a sinking ship.

On the other hand working on mainframes could be a lucrative option for the over 50 crowd that is being age discriminated against by Silicon Valley.

Re: IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

#20

Post by toomuchtodo »

gnum4n wrote: post #18
CanaryLayout wrote: post #3

If IBM weren't hostile to the Hercules project and allowed local licensing to run z/OS, CICS, IMS and DB2 on it, perhaps more hobbyists would want to careerpath themselves on to the s390 architecture. I do love the s390 arch and the massive IO hardware over there, but IBM has paywalled down entry so hard that there is no audience. They even went to the trouble of making Go binaries transportable for direct execution…

Former P-series/AIX SME here. I agree 100%. IBM's training programs are a joke. P-series and mainframe machines have a lot of cool tech, and they're very resilient. They can even lose a CPU or some RAM and keep running. x86 systems would more likely freeze/crash immediately. But the only reason I know P-series/AIX at all is because one small branch of IBM hired me for my linux skills back in 2011, and I learned on th…

This is why they bought RedHat.
Post reply on HN