
Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap - rbanffy
https://info.model9.io/lack-of-mid-level-mfers
======
marktangotango
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 are costs centers, always
will be. And the target of cost cutting. Millenials aren’t dumb!

~~~
e5india
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...](https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature-
story/article/21019526/dst-systems-and-the-gutting-of-a-hometown-kansas-city-
company)

~~~
TomK32
That was worth reading. capitalism's fixation on quarterly reports is ruining
successful companies like DST.

~~~
eikenberry
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).

~~~
s73v3r_
Sorry, but that is entirely captialism. You don't get to take core aspects of
the system and say it's not really part of the system.

~~~
kurczynski
False. Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade
and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the
state.

------
smolder
The way the article is describing millennials is from someone who has an
outsiders view and a poor understanding. The things millennials do are not
because millennials have wildly different values, they're because the world
changed. Everyone in business learned giving pensions, training people and
retaining people doesn't pay off. The post-ww2 bubble of prosperity has let
out its air. That environment no longer exists. At this point you've got to
have a good reason to commit to working in a dwindling market, for example
being ordered to in the military.

The only thing mainframe shops have to learn from Facebook et al is how to do
large scale services without mainframes and cobol etc. They've already got the
"let's overstate our talent pool problems because we want cheaper workers"
part figured out, it seems.

~~~
tivert
> Everyone in business learned giving pensions, training people and retaining
> people doesn't pay off.

 _...in the short term._

------
natvert
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?

~~~
johnklos
Try this:

Ok, maybe this is a silly question, but I am {...}.... Question: what is a
house and why would I want one? In my mind I think of it as a big, but
inelastic, tent. If that's true, why wouldn't I want to just get multiple
tents instead?

A mainframe is the kind of computer you can buy and set up, turn on, and run
for two decades (or more, if you like) non-stop. It doesn't need reboots, it
most often doesn't even need to be powered down for hardware replacement or
upgrades. It's the epitome of reliability.

Most people don't care about reliability. Heck - most people use Windows, so
they can't even possibly imagine what reliability and consistency might be
like. Therefore, most people can't even imagine wanting reliability because
what they have seems "good enough".

People who run services which should never go down, on the other hand, love
mainframes.

~~~
WoahNow
Except when they do go down it can be a catastrophic business interrupting
event. Which is why the cloud model of assume everything is going to break and
all your hardware is disposable works much better (IMO).

~~~
toomuchtodo
AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure break more often than our mainframes. In this
case, the cloud model is a con, essentially the self checkout lane at Walmart.
You're paying more for the same ability you had before.

"Well, you want redundancy right? Well you're supposed to be redundant across
AZs, and then regions, and then you're going to have to have disparate vendors
to mitigate sole vendor risks." And then we're right back to hosting our own
mainframes in our datacenters.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Clouds reinvent mainframes. They're still cheaper, run more FOSS, and have
more talent available. They're a better form of lockin than mainframes.

~~~
mmt
> They're still cheaper

Are they, though? Commodity hardware certainly is, but it's not as if cloud
providers are charging a small margin on top of that. They're charging a
multiple, potentially as large as 10x.

Combined with the parent's proposed need of multi-cloud, that could turn what
might otherwise be a few hundred $k of commodity servers into a few $M of
cloud costs, which I understand is the OOM the cost of a mainframe.

~~~
dfox
Problem with IaaS clouds is that it is strictly less reliable than having your
own infrastructure.

With IaaS typical reliability issue is that whole location/datacenter/AZ goes
down, with your own infrastructure the typical issue is that the colo-
facility/datacenter goes down, which would be essentially identical save the
fact that with IaaS there is significantly larger probability that the reason
for going down is some byzantine failure of orchestration automation, which in
the self-hosted case either isn't there or is under your control.

One fact of running your own infrastructure is that you should plan for
hardware failures, but not stress about it too much, because even entry-level
enterprise-grade hardware just does not break (and if it does you will get
signs that it is going to break well in advance).

~~~
TheCoelacanth
It is only strictly less reliable than having your own infrastructure if you
assume the same level of organizational competence at running your own
infrastructure as the IaaS has at running theirs.

That is certainly possible for an organization to achieve, but it isn't easy
and it isn't cheap. It certainly can't be taken for granted.

~~~
mmt
> if you assume the same level of organizational competence at running your
> own infrastructure

I'm not sure that the competence required is organizational (e.g. people
managing) so much as operational (e.g. best practices) and even technical, at
least at sub-FAANMG scale.

> it isn't easy and it isn't cheap. It certainly can't be taken for granted.

I agree that it can't be taken for granted, but I disagree with it not being
easy and cheap. Rather, combining the two, I don't believe it's necessarily
hard nor necessarily expensive.

It just requires finding someone who both still has the competence, is willing
to use it, and is willing to train others. Running your own infrastructure
isn't actually difficult or complicated, but it's certainly not "sexy" and can
be a bit tedious at times. That means it's possible to hire inexpensive, less
(overall) experienced staff and have them handle that portion. Unfortunately,
the "unsexy" part means finding someone to do the training, as well as the
actual work when necessary, can be challenging, even though we're out there.

Even then, that's only necessary at substantial scale. In <1000 server
environments, I've never had the hardware-specific [1] part of the work take
up more than a quarter of one senior FTE (usually me).

What _can_ get astronomically expensive is outsourcing the wrong things,
though that ends up being a form of not actually running your own
infrastructure (yourself).

Anecdote: I recently had a phone interview with a startup that moved from
"hardware" to the cloud and the main reason cited was the inability to ramp
capacity up fast enough (nor predictably fast enough), which seemed odd to me.
One example of unpredictability of lead times involved a new server
underperforming due to mis-applied thermal compound between the CPU and
cooler, which I have _never_ experienced [2]. I didn't ask the rhetorical
question, "how could you have picked such a horrible VAR?!" Carefully re-
reading the blog post about their transition gave me my "aha" moment: even
though it's a company in the SFBA, their datacenter was out of state (maybe
not even in a tech hub city, but it didn't specify). They were outsourcing the
actual installation, running, and maintenance of their hardware to someone
else, far away.

[1] for lack of a better term.. i.e. anything that an IaaS cloud provider
would eliminate, including purchasing and vendor negotiations, colo space,
network hardware and providers, hardware monitoring, and data destruction

[2] well, OK, that's a lie, since I've experienced it when I've personally
done CPU moves/swaps/upgrades in exceptional circumstances, when I was out of
practice, but I knew to test my work and caught the problem immediately. I've
never had it happen with professionally-assembled systems, presumably because
CPU coolers tend to arrive with the thermal compound pre-applied.

------
wolfgke
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.

~~~
nulagrithom
> 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 spinning up a "virtual machine" in the
office to play around on is a licensing mess, and there's no "cloud" where I
can rent one for a reasonable fee (that I've found). I have no sandbox.

Since my continued access to that environment isn't guaranteed or even
convenient, I don't really want to dive in. And if I don't want to dive in
then learning about it at all feels like a waste of time. Which then means I
end up learning the absolute minimum before moving back to familiar territory.

~~~
Someone
[http://www.timeshare400.com](http://www.timeshare400.com). Starts at
$15/month.

~~~
nulagrithom
Thanks for this. Will actually be really useful form me.

------
rbanffy
Let me add a shameless plug here:

[https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/118484/mainframes...](https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/118484/mainframes?referrer=iAGSGOUsQhhu5K9oA-93Cw2)

It's a proposed Stack Exchange website dedicated to mainframes. It is in
commitment phase, which means people need to come up and commit to support the
site - with questions, answers, moderation, comments - in numbers sufficient
to ensure its viability.

~~~
dirkt
It needs especially committers with sufficient reputation on other
stackexchange sites, which is the only thing holding it back right now.

Maybe one should start a discussion on meta-stackexchange that the usual
criteria are not a good fit for that one, because many of the committers don't
use other stackexchange sites that much.

~~~
rbanffy
That's true. Let me prepare an argument.

------
js8
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.

~~~
lovich
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

~~~
js8
There are advantages and disadvantages to mainframe specialization. Because
it's a stable thing for big companies, there is actually more job security
than in other areas of IT. Big companies need to keep these systems running,
somehow; they are more open to training people from the outside, and they are
willing to pay for expertise. There is an evolutionary balance.

You also say that you would like the field you select to be growing. Selecting
a growing field can be more risky, too. Things that are already widely adopted
are probably proven to work really well, and therefore they are there to stay
for a while.

As for the older people in the industry, I have always enjoyed it. Compared to
young people, older people are generally more calm and less needy to prove
themselves than young people. They actually understand (and demand from the
company) the work-life balance better. And they have more interesting stories
to tell. The truth is lot of smart people worked on the mainframe in the past,
and often the most successful stayed in the business.

The fear that innovation gets ignored - well, that is partly unfounded. It's
true that mainframe is supposed to be super stable platform (it's a
philosophical difference), so you only change things in production when
needed. But in tooling, you can innovate a lot.

I work for one of the mainframe companies mentioned in the article, but I am
not American. In our office, there is plenty of young people and some of them
do really good innovation, like for example writing some Python or JS tools.
Usually, the older people are impressed by that, as long as it brings some
practical value.

------
kibwen
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.

~~~
bluedino
You have it go the other way, as well. We were running some accounting
software on an System i (AS/400, iSeries, like you said whatever IBM calls it
this decade), and recently switched to something that runs commodity hardware.

Another company that I knew from our user group meeting also switched - the
batch processing was so slow, they had to go back to the IBM. Their shipping
process just wasn't fast enough otherwise. This wasn't a small company,
either. If you're familiar with firearms you've probably heard of them.

You can run the 5250 at 27x132, and if you really need screen space you can
run Eclipse/Visual Age on your desktop and have a 'real' environment to code
on.

~~~
kibwen
_> You can run the 5250 at 27x132_

This does ring a bell, I think I did discover this eventually ("wide mode",
they called it?). And I'm not sure if this is damning with faint praise, but I
will admit that the 5250 monospace font kinda grew on me.

Interesting to hear that I could have been using Eclipse for RPG; for the PHP
side (which was still running on the mainframe via AIX, so I had at least a
few Unix tools at my disposal (not git though... I had to expose the PHP
source directory via a fileshare and mount it via NFS on Windows so that I
could leverage msysgit (it's as ridiculous and slow as it sounds, running VCS
in a Unix emulation layer on Windows performing filesystem operations over the
network to a virtual filesystem in a Unix emulation layer on an IBM mainframe
(but I digress)))), I got the company to shell out for WebSphere, which I
thought being an IBM product might have some RPG support, but alas.

~~~
bluedino
Zend has a php product for the IBM i that isn’t too bad - and it runs like you
said on a Unix-ish file layout and everything.

------
pjc50
The answer given by the article is literally conscription: the authors were
assigned to the mainframe unit as part of their national service in Israel,
and found that they liked it.

------
Ws32ok
Fine. I want to learn how to maintain/write software for a mainframe.

How do I start? Can I get access to one? Can I build up something I can learn
on? What is the best path for doing this? How would I usefully gain enough
experience to get into this?

I have linux, python, c, but unsurprisingly can’t afford 30 million (or
whatever) on a mainframe.

I know about Hercules, but I’d only be able to run Linux. Is that right? Is
that useful?

My feeling is that I’d need experience to get a job, but I can’t get
experience without a job. Seems like the whole shortage is a lie. If there was
a shortage I’d be able to find various organisations falling over themselves
to help me into mainframes.

~~~
mr_toad
When industry X complains about shortage of Y what they actually want is for
someone else to pay for the training of a bunch of Y, so they can hire them
for peanuts and dispose of them at will.

------
tabtab
Fear of not keeping up with the Technical Joneses is a huge influence in our
industry because everyone sees "old" programmers booted first when a company
or the economy sours. Nobody wants to be That Guy (or Gal).

If mainframes are perceived as a shrinking or outmoded technology,
obsolescence fear kicks in and people avoid it. It may need some clever
marketing to trick people into giving up that fear or impression. BS works in
other areas, per mind-share. Call mainframes "high-up-time cloud", Cloud++,
cloud.js, Deep Cloud, or something. There's better BS'ers out there than I.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Dunno, I'm a millennial (didn't even know I was part of that group till
recently, gotta love being profiled by things I cannot control) and all it
took me to like Mainframes (although I don't work with them) was hearing an
older developer tell me all about them and their capabilities. I'm a total
computer nerd aside from a programmer so I love learning about tech old, new
and upcoming.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Yeah, all it would take for me to take on a mainframe is "we need someone for
a permanent position that you can live on". I'm in this profession because I
loved computers as a kid and it's never stopped. You wanna show me something
novel? I'll be happy to learn it (assuming there's a livable job in there at
the same time). They just have to be willing to teach it.

------
punk-coder
Back in 1996, I lived in Columbus, GA. There are a couple companies down there
that used Mainframes for their processing. Synovous/TSYS, AFLAC and Blue Cross
Blue Shield. Those companies teamed up with Columbus State University to
provide a program for people to learn how to program in the technologies they
used:

\- Cobol, CICS, Rexx \- DB2, IMS, VSAM \- JCL

You got paid to go to 6 months of school, and if you already had a Bachelors
degree, you got a second one for the classes you took. You went from 9 - 5
each day, and you were guaranteed a job at one of those companies, and if you
worked for at least 4 years, you didn't have to pay back the loan you got to
go through the training.

I was part of the second group of people that trained, and it started my
professional career as a developer. Once Y2K was done, I moved on from
mainframe programming to Java and .NET.

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

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

~~~
KZeillmann
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.

~~~
module0000
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
component has three or four duplicates, just waiting for a primary component
to fail so they can take over. They aren't cost effective, but they are
operationally effective.

~~~
smolder
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.

------
zorked
Maybe I am prejudiced but I have the feeling that mainframes get sold to shops
with a lot of money based on the salesman's skills and, well, I wouldn't be
surprised if there was a kickback here and there, to oil the old engine. Not
because they are the best tech.

That may be a bigger obstacle to people getting in that area. You can make
money in non-corrupt companies where your career won't get stuck.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I bet the kickbacks are like any other enterprise IT sales process: wine &
dine, golf and box seats. Except the restaurants and courses are probably much
nicer. Decision makers have pretty strict policies to follow that restrict
gifts over a certain dollar amount but invite a bunch of employees to a box
seat at a sporting event you already paid for and how much that gift is worth
depends on how you measure the value.

------
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.

~~~
mmt
> no data theft or any malware destroying data.

That would only be true if the mainframes never interfaced to any other
systems or to any humans. Since the latter can't be the case, and the former
hasn't been the case for a long time, this just doesn't hold.

> 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.

There's an implied false dichotomy here, though, that ignores a decade or two
of using commodity hardware, before cloud was viable/popular. It was also pay-
as-you-go, just with much larger increments, so it didn't work as well for as
small companies. That's still available and is actually cheaper (and carries
less vendor lock-in).

Perhaps ironically, large enough companies routinely pay millions to AWS. In
theory, they could switch providers, but not if they bought in to any of the
vendor-specific services. As you say, cloud is, in many ways, a copy of
mainframes.

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

That may be a stretch, since "massive" isn't what it used to be. Something
like all the world's financial transactions might have been massive, in
computer terms, 20 years ago, but, today, processors have 1000x the transistor
densities, spinning disks have 20x+ the I/O, and SSDs are even faster.

I'd argue that the scientific, physical lab, HPC/supercomputing world is the
place for that. The quantities of data produced by the instruments at LLNL's
NIF or CERN's LHC would easily overwhelm a mainframe, even after initial
processing/filtering.

------
pierotofy
What gap, just pay more for the position.

~~~
zubairq
best comment of them all, I agree, there is no skills shortage of mainframe
programmers!

------
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/](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.

------
fortylove
Fidelity Investments has a software engineer training program for fresh
college graduates that lasts a few months and is supposed to prepare them to
work at Fidelity. The training program is split into different tracks, one of
which is a mainframe track [1].

[1] [https://www.cs.uri.edu/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/...](https://www.cs.uri.edu/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/Leap-Job-Description-2014-revised-July-20131.pdf)

------
martin1b
Working with a mainframe everyday, the system is very fast and reliable. The
hardware was very much ahead of it's time when released. I agree that the
platform is an impressive one.

My issue is with the developed software and database design. Although the
software is custom written, many mainframe developers do not understand the
concepts of modern programming and do not improve over time. Once they learn a
concept (sometimes 30 years in the past), they continue to develop this way,
rather than improving as it is outside their comfort zone. They are not open
to new concepts or ideas. When you have a team of developers doing this over
several decades, you end up with a big ball of mud.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud)

Trying to port a big ball of mud to another language is very difficult, which
contributes to mainframe developer job security and monolithic, antiquated
systems. Modern developers are very particular to code portability,
readability and modern concepts. Hopefully this is just in my experience and
not common across other mainframe developers.

------
stephengillie
Modern mainframes are just cloud compute. These are services and microservices
written in proprietary programming languages, using possibly-proprietary CPU
and RAM. They're equivalent to a few racks of Windows or Linux servers behind
load balancers. Or a small fortune in AWS services.

Cray, IBM, et al sell computing nostalgia and laziness. Their biggest product
is the need to not rewrite code in an open system.

~~~
hakfoo
I think that's rather a flip attitude.

Say you have a 30-year-old codebase. Odds are there's not completely accurate
documentation for everything. Even if you have an accurate spec on paper, it
may not encode every gimmick and undefined behavior that external consumers
depend on. And if you bollix the switchover up, you're burning tens of
thousands of dollars per minute of unavailability.

In that situation, saying "pay $5M for a new mainframe, which buys you another
ten years of predictability, 20% more performance, and 20% less power
consumption" is a solid alternative to "spend five years and several million
dollars in developer effort trying to build something modern that's a drop-in
replacement and then praying it doesn't catch fire or have hideous real-world
performance when you go live"

------
Aloha
I emailed IBM about 10 years ago, to see if they had a certification program
for z/OS, they didnt - it appears they do now, which excites me.

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NoPicklez
I work for a large consulting firm and I do a lot of work helping large
government and private companies perform data migrations away from AS/400
mainframe environments.

Many people will say that there is a shortage of skills when it comes to
mainframe environments, that might be true, however the need for such skills
is diminishing significantly.

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CaliforniaKarl
One comment out of that was interesting to me:

>And it’s not all COBOL anymore. Today mainframe programmers use Python,
Linux, node.js, Java, blockchain.

node.js on a mainframe? That doesn’t strike me as being something that can
uninterrupted for years.

~~~
js8
It's not used to run anything critical.

