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. Som

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.