[HN Gopher] IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill ...
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IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips
Author : pell
Score : 18 points
Date : 2024-03-31 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| pram wrote:
| "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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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 invested.
|
| (The hard part I see is holding companies to career
| progression, so they don't just bring in people at Google L4/L5
| equivalent TC, but plan for those people to become less mobile
| to other employers due to mainframe skillsets, so easy to
| retain without normal tech growth in compensation over time.)
| trhway wrote:
| >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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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...
| gnum4n wrote:
| 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.
| CanaryLayout wrote:
| 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 under z/OS. But if you want new people to
| write code on the platform you need to make access to the
| platform a thing.
| CanaryLayout wrote:
| And no, the paywalled IBM Cloud LPARs are a joke.
|
| The mainframe is not a special thing anymore, hasn't been since
| the late 90s. It's just a server box.
|
| I work at a shop with a z/14. I would love it if we finished
| the last COBOL retirements and go back to the mainframe but
| this time to run container farms, fresh Go code, and use thr
| power to run way deeper matrices of tests that take days to run
| locally and cannot afford to run on AWS.
| CanaryLayout wrote:
| IBM could sell the future of the on premises z/xxx boxes as
| "datacenter in one rack"
|
| Running x86 in z/VM has been a discussion for 25 years. Just
| fucking do it. Let people run whatever they want.
|
| Just as people are excited about ARM for low-watt computing,
| make s390x just as exciting for people who want insane
| vertical resources but using the same dev tools that are used
| now for easy x86/ARM crossover.
|
| But IBM culture has always been about overcharging a small
| and rich audience and now they are sitting around hocking
| their services cohosted thru AWS and everyone who has COBOL
| and 360ASM running are doing retirements with no plans to use
| the boxes after its all unloaded.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Just as people are excited about ARM for low-watt
| computing, make s390x just as exciting for people who want
| insane vertical resources but using the same dev tools that
| are used now for easy x86/ARM crossover.
|
| The funny thing is that AIUI the technology is already
| basically there. They actually did throw the resources into
| getting a lot of Open Source software to be compatible with
| s390x, they've got Linux LPARs and LinuxONE. My
| _understanding_ is that they just... don 't make any effort
| to sell, outside a tiny fraction of Enterprise(tm).
| gnum4n wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is why they bought RedHat.
| jiayo wrote:
| This might be the hardest to parse headline I've ever read.
| aeyes wrote:
| Most mainframe jobs I have seen require years of mainframe
| experience. I'd love to dip my toes in but I never found a way
| in.
|
| And how intelligent is it to start working on something that is
| extremely niche if you aren't already an expert in the field.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| 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.
| webwanderings wrote:
| 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 2015 is prior to social media?
| pohl wrote:
| Did social media exist before Elon invented X?
| diego_moita wrote:
| 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.
| dlachausse wrote:
| 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.
| devwastaken wrote:
| There is a store chain nearby hiring for an IBM mainframe dev.
| It's unlikely anyone but a career mainframe dev will ever pass,
| and they're not taking on anyone new.
|
| 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."
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