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Mainframes have been having a moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, certain enterprises are finally waking up to the fact that firing all those mainframers wasn'

Mainframes have been having a moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, certain enterprises are finally waking up to the fact that firing all those mainframers wasn't the best idea for the long-term. The current problem isn't the lack of interest of availability of training; both would be there if it weren't for the fact that enterprises are more interested in having their code written by consulting companies in India than by domestic employees.

heisenbit 7y ago
It is not only lay offs it is also retirements. And the pressure is mounting with baby boomers gone soon. I was once in a discussion taking over the maintenance of a system and the picture was grim. The crew running the system was so thin it was hard to imagine them having the time handing it over. Besides they barely understood all the details as the system had been build by people 30 years ago all gone a long time ago. A big bowl of spaghetti in a core part of their enterprise. We decided not to try to take this on - too much risk.
- rtempaccount1 7y ago
  I was at a talk about mainframe security recently where the state of play with one company was, there were three users in their admins group for the mainframe, two had retired, and the third was past retirement age... When you combine retirements with decades of under-documented code doing critical functions, it's not a recipe for good long term success...
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    I dunno; rewriting it in some shit tier EC2 FunNewLang framework that changes every year doesn't sound like a recipe for long term success either. When I look at how mainframes work, and how "clouds" work, I wonder at how imbecilic IBM management (or one of their competitors) must have been to not capture that value in the first place.
    - w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 7y ago
      "The Eternal Mainframe" http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
    - rtempaccount1 7y ago
      There is a middle ground between those two extremes of course. I'm not surprised at the mainframe's lack of success at all, the barriers to entry are extreme, meaning there's an inevitable lack of activity. I've worked in environments which had mainframes deployed and even as an employee it was inordinately difficult to get any access to them. Combine that with IBM's "enterprise" sales process and it's not a mystery that they lost the fight to attract newer systems...

heisenbit 7y ago

It is not only lay offs it is also retirements. And the pressure is mounting with baby boomers gone soon. I was once in a discussion taking over the maintenance of a system and the picture was grim. The crew running the system was so thin it was hard to imagine them having the time handing it over. Besides they barely understood all the details as the system had been build by people 30 years ago all gone a long time ago. A big bowl of spaghetti in a core part of their enterprise. We decided not to try to take this on - too much risk.

rtempaccount1 7y ago
I was at a talk about mainframe security recently where the state of play with one company was, there were three users in their admins group for the mainframe, two had retired, and the third was past retirement age... When you combine retirements with decades of under-documented code doing critical functions, it's not a recipe for good long term success...
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  I dunno; rewriting it in some shit tier EC2 FunNewLang framework that changes every year doesn't sound like a recipe for long term success either. When I look at how mainframes work, and how "clouds" work, I wonder at how imbecilic IBM management (or one of their competitors) must have been to not capture that value in the first place.
  - w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 7y ago
    "The Eternal Mainframe" http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
  - rtempaccount1 7y ago
    There is a middle ground between those two extremes of course. I'm not surprised at the mainframe's lack of success at all, the barriers to entry are extreme, meaning there's an inevitable lack of activity. I've worked in environments which had mainframes deployed and even as an employee it was inordinately difficult to get any access to them. Combine that with IBM's "enterprise" sales process and it's not a mystery that they lost the fight to attract newer systems...