

Have Mainframe Skills, Will Travel - edw519
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Have-Mainframe-Skills-Will-Travel-62526.html

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wanorris
There's no question that you can make a good living learning to program
dinosaur machines in COBOL, but then you would have to spend your life
programming in COBOL.

Good coders want to use the best tools, because using good tools are part of
being a good programmer. Unless things have changed radically, those tools
don't exist on mainframes -- or at least, what most people consider the best
tools don't.

Taking one of these jobs is more or less the exact opposite of starting your
own company.

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ten-seven
Some corporations made hefty investments in big iron. That doesn't make them
economically viable today. I still believe that performance, energy
conservation, space utilization, HVAC optimization, etc., etc. are reasons for
updating to the latest hardware and the operating systems that they run. From
a strictly hardware standpoint, the old stuff gets hairy to manage and
maintain.

You can keep driving that 1979 AMC Matador, and you can keep rebuilding the
engine, and patching the rust holes. But after you've spent thousands on the
upkeep, you could have bought a new car that gets better gas mileage and won't
strand you on the freeway half-way to work on a rainy morning. Any corporation
that didn't look to the future, is the corporation where you'll find the
dinosaurs. And that doesn't say much for corporations like State Farm.

~~~
wallflower
Mainframes still do a lot of heavy lifting. Like processing the world's credit
card transactions in real-time.

VisaNet is four strategically-located mainframe supercenters for financial
transaction processing. 3000 transactions/second. 50 million LOC. Uptime and
five-second-transaction time crucial.

"Authorizing..."

~~~
henning
There's badass large-scale neural network implementations like Visa's fraud
checking, and then there's maintaining 100 KLOC of spaghetti shit.

Hint: the leet Visa mainframe programmers are not the ones who write the
systems that are the reason even simple things at a bank take a business day.

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henning
As Paul Graham has pointed out, there is a salary premium associated with work
that sucks the life out of you one day at a time.

Forget about working on open source stuff at night after work. You'll be too
burned out and depressed.

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xenoterracide
I would like to learn how to use a mainframe? does anyone know if any of the
mainframe os's (z/os and os/400 off the top of my head) can be run in a
virtual environment? so I can learn them?

as an admin, big iron turns me on :D

