4 ms·

I'm really curious how the hiring for jobs on legacy mainframes works. My Dad was the consultant IBM hired to fix issues in system/32/34/36 and AS\400 software

I'm really curious how the hiring for jobs on legacy mainframes works. My Dad was the consultant IBM hired to fix issues in system/32/34/36 and AS\400 software for customers in Australia. He had a title related to RPG, but I don't know what it was. Growing up we had a (functioning) system/36 and later an AS\400 in the shed. He's never stopped developing, still works as a .Net developer, but hasn't been able to get through the recruiter filter for RPG and cobol jobs, possibly because he hasn't worked with recent generations of these tools, even as he is getting hired for .Net jobs on major systems.

tyingq 6y ago
"He had a title related to RPG, but I don't know what it was." That's pretty neat. RPG is apparently the default high level language used on IBM midrange systems (AS/400). I looked at a beginners tutorial here: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/coding-rpg-iv-beginners-tutorial https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/coding-rpg-iv-beginners-tu... It seems very similar to other procedural languages, and one of the examples shows a very easy FFI interface to call out to C. They make a wrapper for printf.