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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

#81

Post by lovich »

js8 wrote: post #41

As a mainframer: IBM should make the z/OS available for free experimentation! That's the biggest obstacle and reason why people do not know it. Even the long dead Solaris has more hackers on it than z/OS. Also, millenials will also want job security and pensions, eventually. Just wait when they have kids.

As a millennial I took a pass on mainframe jobs, even though I find mainframes interesting, precisely because of job security.

Companies are not going to change their culture overnight, and they currently view employees as disposable. There's not many jobs in mainframe developer compared to say web dev, and the skills in mainframe developer to seem like they transfer poorly.

I have a better chance at keeping the actual day to day of my life stable if I keep skills in an industry where I have lots of opportunities for jobs. Unless companies employing mainframe developer start offering garunteed pensions that are funded up front or a much higher average salary than the alternatives, it's not a gamble I'd be willing to take

Edit: additionally the mainframe engineer talent pool seems to skew much older than other development. That wouldn't be a problem if the field was growing. Having a decent chance of always being the new guy or junior even if you've been there 10+ years would probably do little for job satisfaction given how many people automatically defer to seniority. I have no real interest in having my ideas ignored for years

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#82

Post by petra »

dfox wrote: post #42
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 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 ?

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#83

Post by lovich »

lovich wrote: post #79
twoquestions wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the responses to this question could have been copy/pasted from Erlang marketing copy. I'm still not seeing what mainframes give you that a well-designed pc cluster couldn't, other than marketing BS and opportunity for grift. Waitaminute...

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

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#84

Post by smolder »

module0000 wrote: post #74
KZeillmann wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking out of complete ignorance: What can a mainframe do that other kinds of machines can't? I barely understand what a mainframe is or why you'd use one over other technologies.

This question has an easy answer: exactly what they have been doing for 20-50 years. Inertia is a real thing. Other relevant answers might include "true fault tolerance". More than half of your mainframe can be burned to a crisp, or being chewed on by a dinosaur - doesn't matter, it will keep working. The closest bad analogy I can think of...is a mainframe is like the NASA space missions of yesteryear. Every componen…

Other relevent factor: mainframes are probably not riddled with security flaws. If Iran used a mainframe in their nuclear enrichment facility, they might never have gotten hacked by nsa and friends.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#85

Post by detaro »

lovich wrote: post #79
twoquestions wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the responses to this question could have been copy/pasted from Erlang marketing copy. I'm still not seeing what mainframes give you that a well-designed pc cluster couldn't, other than marketing BS and opportunity for grift. Waitaminute...

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...

Is that just required in storage formats (which on other platforms would just mean conversion when accessing files) or do calculations actually have be done in it (which would need to be simulated, more overhead and potentially harder to certify correctness)?

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#86

Post by Roboprog »

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 ?

Data bandwidth probably

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#87

Post by watwut »

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.

Or maybe, hire people and have them spend some time learning. Pay them while they are learning. Pay them enough to stick afterwards and treat them well.

Really. If people dont have exact skill you need but have aptitude, hire them and pay them to learn. No matter what missing skill is.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#88

Post by mmt »

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

Although downvotes don't necessarily mean factual incorrectness (and I didn't downvote), that may have been the case here. It may also have been because the comment could be read as implying undue influence (and thereby indirect subsidy) by government regulation, injecting controversy/politics where there is none.

Regardless, I wasn't able to find in the WP entry adequate support of your assertion. (Oddly, the "[..]" were in the original WP text):

> As IBM is the only remaining provider of hardware (and only in their mainframes) using their non-standard floating-point format, no popular file format requires it; Except the FDA requires the SAS file format and "All floating-point numbers in the file are stored using the IBM mainframe representation. [..] Most platforms use the IEEE representation for floating-point numbers. [..] To assist you in reading and/or writing transport files, we are providing routines to convert from IEEE representation (either big endian or little endian) to transport representation and back again." Code for IBM's format is also available under LGPLv2.1

There's only a regulation for a file format (and a single, isolated one at that), not regulation of using/processing, and format conversion utilities are available, rendering it irrelevant.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#89

Post by mmt »

j1vms wrote: post #48
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?

> what is a mainframe and why would I want one? Very roughly speaking, a mainframe is to a CPU what a supercomputer is to a GPU.

If speaking very roughtly, I'd go so far as to extend that analogy to the CPUs, as well, and, more importantly, the I/O.

Re: Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap

#90

Post by bobbydreamer »

Cloud is initally is a copy of mainframe just a affordable cheaper version. Mainframe aka z/OS is not old it's just like any other software always upgraded only thing is hardware is also upgraded with it. Positive thing about mainframe is if you write a program and if it serves its propose it can run for decades without an issue. Mainframe is made up of TSO CONSOLE, SDSF, CA7(job scheduling), Db2 database, CICS(online system), JCLs to run batch jobs. Languages are primarily Enterprise COBOL and rexx for developing inhouse tools.

Why to use mainframe, less downtime(data sharing & Plex environments make it look like no downtime), no data theft or any malware destroying data.

Why cloud is better ? Pay as you go, this works for all startups and small companies using latest front applications. With mainframes you will be paying from millions to billions to IBM so only large corporates can afford it.

My opinion, Initially IBM with all this tech boom on cloud they thought they can wait it out and it will fade away and they were mostly focussing on Watson. Since that boom didn't stop, now they have started to put some work. Mainframe is not a JSON world yet. Last few years mainframe is developing rapidly as well new flavours of languages like java and python are introduced. z/Linux and z/VM(like compute engines small z/os vm's) are being introduced. IBM Cloud is bluemix free for only 30days anyone interested can try it out. CA-Endevor which is mainframe change management tool is getting integrated with git mostly preference is given to bitbucket as Altassian has many products like Jira under their wings. Now machine learning is also coming in.

During college days i wanted to be a web designer. But got a job in Mainframe technology and given only month training. That's enough to start in mainframes. Yes, you are going to see black & green screens for rest of your life if you are a mainframer, creating a progress bar in rexx is a skill, it looks cool but stalls the screen so you don't want to do it and you will be aware to things like entire CPU is shared across various users across your organisation.

If you want to learn a technology that processes massive data. Mainframe is the place.

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