21–30 of 44 posts
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?
Industry starts with the customers and the customers are trying to squeeze out costs as much as possible, shooting themselves in the foot.
Fun fact IBM pushes their hiring through a terrible 3rd party system that barely functions and doesn't even include options for common related degrees. IBM is incompetent and only exist because of wealthy corporatations paying politicians to have long intellectual property lifetimes.
I emailed their hiring service about it once and their response was essentially "take it up with someone else."
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.
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.
IBM probably wouldn't hire them anyway, even if they publicly say they will for PR reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This might be the hardest to parse headline I've ever read.
The website The Register has its roots in England. My impression is that English newspapers have their own style and idioms for headlines that takes some getting used to. But once you do, the headlines become easy to read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's hard to keep up a trained workforce when they lock the doors so tight.
There’s a secondary problem: they literally just don’t make things the way they used to. Nearly 100% of all SPAs i visit are busted in some manner, or break depending on the day of the week. Main frames and the culture that surrounds them is one of not breaking, ever, and maintaining backwards compatibility into eternity. There are js modules that measures their lts support in months. Most actual engineering has been lost out of modern software development: instead we just throw whatever was last month away for the latest redesign.