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As others have said, Toronto should have about as many jobs as you can hope to find for such an obscure part of software development these days. A lot of zOS s

As others have said, Toronto should have about as many jobs as you can hope to find for such an obscure part of software development these days. A lot of zOS shops hire remote developers these days too, because it's hard to find local people with the right skill set. I imagine it'd be pretty hard to get a remote position as your first job, but it's a good option for the second. IBM themselves doesn't hire remote workers anymore though, at least I don't think they do. Banks are your best bet for COBOL, as well as certain parts of the government. The IRS in the US still uses mainframes. Some big companies in the zOS world that you might look into are BMC Software, Rocket Software, and CA Technologies. I would also recommend not limiting yourself to COBOL - plenty of mainframe programming is still being done in high level assembler, c, and c++. If you know CICS, DB2, and JCL already then it would probably be easy to get a job writing Java for mainframes as well. Also, if you really love zOS and want a degree, Marist College in upstate NY has a degree program specifically for zOS. It's the only such program in the world, as far as I know. http://idcp.marist.edu/enterprisesystemseducation/zosprogramoverview.html http://idcp.marist.edu/enterprisesystemseducation/zosprogram... I graduated college in 2016 and have been working at a small company that sells a high level assembler debugger for zOS since then. If you (or anyone else reading this) have any more questions about zOS programming or the mainframe industry in general, feel free to shoot me an email. My email address should be on my profile.

SuperPaintMan 8y ago
Thank god I just found a use for my dusty C skills, but I will have to pick up Java. More languages in the toolkit never hurt right? As noted above the gameplan right now is to get over to the GTA and keep working on my skills until I can afford the move. A poster in the r/mainframe thread suggested trying to get my floor in the door with a position in Ops and working up from there would be a good idea. What are your thoughts? The college looks interesting, but America. :(
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  Working in ops is a good plan - in the mainframe world, the people we would normally call system administrators are called systems programmers or sysprogs. Sometimes you can find a specific position (being a sysprog for CICS and nothing else, for example) or a more general role. Either way it's pretty easy to move from sysprog to developer once you have some mainframe experience because mainframe experience is so rare these days. You'll also be working reasonably closely with the development teams, so that helps too.

SuperPaintMan 8y ago

Thank god I just found a use for my dusty C skills, but I will have to pick up Java. More languages in the toolkit never hurt right? As noted above the gameplan right now is to get over to the GTA and keep working on my skills until I can afford the move. A poster in the r/mainframe thread suggested trying to get my floor in the door with a position in Ops and working up from there would be a good idea. What are your thoughts? The college looks interesting, but America. :(

wilsonnb2 8y ago
Working in ops is a good plan - in the mainframe world, the people we would normally call system administrators are called systems programmers or sysprogs. Sometimes you can find a specific position (being a sysprog for CICS and nothing else, for example) or a more general role. Either way it's pretty easy to move from sysprog to developer once you have some mainframe experience because mainframe experience is so rare these days. You'll also be working reasonably closely with the development teams, so that helps too.