6 ms·

IBM lifts lid on latest bid to halt mainframe skill slips

32 points by pell 3y ago

pram 3y ago
“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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    >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 3y ago
      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?topic=transform-transforming-cobol-java-by-using-generative-ai https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx-code-assistant-4z/1.1?to... (Have had to sit in meetings on this topic)
  - gnum4n 3y ago
    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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 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™.
jiayo 3y ago
This might be the hardest to parse headline I've ever read.
- fl7305 3y ago
  I didn't even think about it. I do get stumped on some convoluted headlines, but not this one. The website The Register has its roots in England. My impression is that English newspapers have their own style and idioms for headlines that takes some getting used to. But once you do, the headlines become easy to read.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rafaelturk 3y ago
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.
- unixhero 3y ago
  I find it strange that no one has reverse engineered and or cracked the platform and made key generators. The microcode The oses
  - mrjin 3y ago
    The answer is simple: no such needs ever... To deploy mainframes, you've most likely spent millions, sometime might even be hundreds of millions. In other words, money is not the problem. So why would someone ever risk getting into huge trouble by reverse engineering or cracking?
    - unixhero 3y ago
      Because information wants to be free Curiousness A challenge There are sometimes second hand mainframes for sale on Ebay
webwanderings 3y ago
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 3y ago
  2015 is prior to social media?
  - pohl 3y ago
    Did social media exist before Elon invented X?
  - smnrchrds 3y ago
    Well, the comment ends by saying "People have ... memory issues", so it checks out.
diego_moita 3y ago
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.
- _mlbt 3y ago
  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.
  - water_556 3y ago
    [dead]
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > over 50 crowd IBM probably wouldn't hire them anyway, even if they publicly say they will for PR reasons.
- skissane 3y ago
  > And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. I think people are reading more into this announcement than it actually means. Fujitsu has three mainframe lines: GS21, BS2000, and VME. The announcement it links to is only about GS21 hardware, not BS2000 or VME. GS21 started out as clones of IBM mainframes, including both Fujitsu's Japanese clone line, and also Amdahl in the US. In the 1980s thru the first half of the 1990s, Fujitsu's Japanese clones were popular in some countries outside Japan (e.g. Australia), and Amdahl's clones enjoyed a lot of popularity in the US. However, while IBM's own mainframes went from 31-bit to 64-bit in 2000, Fujitsu's GS21 line got stuck on 31-bit. AFAIK, nobody uses it anymore except in Japan, non-Japanese customers either migrated off the mainframe or switched to IBM. In Japan, it clings on in government and some large corporations, but is deeply legacy. BS2000 has a very different heritage. RCA used to sell mainframes in the US. One of their (several incompatible) mainframe lines was partially compatible with IBM S/360, having the same assembly language in user space. However, kernel mode instructions and the software were incompatible. Siemens in Germany bought the rights to it. It ended up surviving in Europe even after it died in the US. Eventually Siemens sold it to Fujitsu. VME was originally the British mainframe manufacturer ICL, which Fujitsu ended up buying. The British government is (I believe) the only people still using it, and they've been trying to get rid of it. Both VME and BS2000 haven't had their own physical hardware for years now – they are just software emulators running under Linux or Windows. As such, they are easy to "migrate to the Cloud". Fujitsu is likely to keep on supporting them (to some degree) as long as there remains at least one customer willing to pay enough $$$ to sustain it. Given that, any timeframes for phasing either out should be taken with a large grain of salt, since their future really depends on how long it takes the remaining customers to get off them. Coming to this GS21 announcement – I understand Fujitsu wants to stop manufacturing and selling physical mainframes in Japan. They can just switch to software emulation like they do for BS2000 and VME. Like both of those, it can run fine in the cloud, and I expect they'll keep it running as long as there is customer demand. Promised future support timelines are very notional, if there is a big enough customer paying for an extension, the extension will happen. Plausibly, it could still be supported in 20 years time – maybe it is used by some essential Japanese government system, and the Japanese government's repeated attempts to migrate to a more modern platform end in failure (not an uncommon story for government IT projects)
devwastaken 3y ago
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."
- mrjin 3y ago
  ^ IBM is incompetent and only exist because of wealthy corporatations paying politicians to have long intellectual property lifetimes. Not quite the case. Current mainframe users haven't migrated from it largely because the simplicity of scaling up, which means they can always buy a newer and more powerful machine when current one can no longer cope with the workload. I would expect it's much cheaper than migrate to other platforms in most if not all cases, considering the costs to develop and test the applications. They can get away with it as long as they can find someone to carry out the upgrade/maintenance work. But if IBM keeps footgunnig itself, it won't belong before those users have to jump the ship as no one can work on it any more.
rhelz 3y ago
I was kinda hoping there would be a link to where I could actually learn some cool stuff about mainframes…
exabrial 3y ago
I’d gladly work on this stuff if it were actually lucrative. There’s a secondary problem: they literally just don’t make things the way they used to. Nearly 100% of all SPAs i visit are busted in some manner, or break depending on the day of the week. Main frames and the culture that surrounds them is one of not breaking, ever, and maintaining backwards compatibility into eternity. There are js modules that measures their lts support in months. Most actual engineering has been lost out of modern software development: instead we just throw whatever was last month away for the latest redesign.
unixhero 3y ago
Open up the learning paths then. Trailhead.com from salesforce is an excellent learning platform they can copy. And open up the technology. Open the microcode generators, open up the operating systems. Civilians must be able to learn it. Not only enployees of banks, insurance and telcos.

32 points by pell 3y ago

pram 3y ago

“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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  >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 3y ago
    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?topic=transform-transforming-cobol-java-by-using-generative-ai https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx-code-assistant-4z/1.1?to... (Have had to sit in meetings on this topic)
- gnum4n 3y ago
  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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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™.

jiayo 3y ago

This might be the hardest to parse headline I've ever read.

fl7305 3y ago
I didn't even think about it. I do get stumped on some convoluted headlines, but not this one. The website The Register has its roots in England. My impression is that English newspapers have their own style and idioms for headlines that takes some getting used to. But once you do, the headlines become easy to read.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rafaelturk 3y ago

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.

unixhero 3y ago
I find it strange that no one has reverse engineered and or cracked the platform and made key generators. The microcode The oses
- mrjin 3y ago
  The answer is simple: no such needs ever... To deploy mainframes, you've most likely spent millions, sometime might even be hundreds of millions. In other words, money is not the problem. So why would someone ever risk getting into huge trouble by reverse engineering or cracking?
  - unixhero 3y ago
    Because information wants to be free Curiousness A challenge There are sometimes second hand mainframes for sale on Ebay

webwanderings 3y ago

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 3y ago
2015 is prior to social media?
- pohl 3y ago
  Did social media exist before Elon invented X?
- smnrchrds 3y ago
  Well, the comment ends by saying "People have ... memory issues", so it checks out.

diego_moita 3y ago

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.

_mlbt 3y ago
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.
- water_556 3y ago
  [dead]
- justinclift 3y ago
  > over 50 crowd IBM probably wouldn't hire them anyway, even if they publicly say they will for PR reasons.
skissane 3y ago
> And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years. I think people are reading more into this announcement than it actually means. Fujitsu has three mainframe lines: GS21, BS2000, and VME. The announcement it links to is only about GS21 hardware, not BS2000 or VME. GS21 started out as clones of IBM mainframes, including both Fujitsu's Japanese clone line, and also Amdahl in the US. In the 1980s thru the first half of the 1990s, Fujitsu's Japanese clones were popular in some countries outside Japan (e.g. Australia), and Amdahl's clones enjoyed a lot of popularity in the US. However, while IBM's own mainframes went from 31-bit to 64-bit in 2000, Fujitsu's GS21 line got stuck on 31-bit. AFAIK, nobody uses it anymore except in Japan, non-Japanese customers either migrated off the mainframe or switched to IBM. In Japan, it clings on in government and some large corporations, but is deeply legacy. BS2000 has a very different heritage. RCA used to sell mainframes in the US. One of their (several incompatible) mainframe lines was partially compatible with IBM S/360, having the same assembly language in user space. However, kernel mode instructions and the software were incompatible. Siemens in Germany bought the rights to it. It ended up surviving in Europe even after it died in the US. Eventually Siemens sold it to Fujitsu. VME was originally the British mainframe manufacturer ICL, which Fujitsu ended up buying. The British government is (I believe) the only people still using it, and they've been trying to get rid of it. Both VME and BS2000 haven't had their own physical hardware for years now – they are just software emulators running under Linux or Windows. As such, they are easy to "migrate to the Cloud". Fujitsu is likely to keep on supporting them (to some degree) as long as there remains at least one customer willing to pay enough $$$ to sustain it. Given that, any timeframes for phasing either out should be taken with a large grain of salt, since their future really depends on how long it takes the remaining customers to get off them. Coming to this GS21 announcement – I understand Fujitsu wants to stop manufacturing and selling physical mainframes in Japan. They can just switch to software emulation like they do for BS2000 and VME. Like both of those, it can run fine in the cloud, and I expect they'll keep it running as long as there is customer demand. Promised future support timelines are very notional, if there is a big enough customer paying for an extension, the extension will happen. Plausibly, it could still be supported in 20 years time – maybe it is used by some essential Japanese government system, and the Japanese government's repeated attempts to migrate to a more modern platform end in failure (not an uncommon story for government IT projects)

devwastaken 3y ago

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."

mrjin 3y ago
^ IBM is incompetent and only exist because of wealthy corporatations paying politicians to have long intellectual property lifetimes. Not quite the case. Current mainframe users haven't migrated from it largely because the simplicity of scaling up, which means they can always buy a newer and more powerful machine when current one can no longer cope with the workload. I would expect it's much cheaper than migrate to other platforms in most if not all cases, considering the costs to develop and test the applications. They can get away with it as long as they can find someone to carry out the upgrade/maintenance work. But if IBM keeps footgunnig itself, it won't belong before those users have to jump the ship as no one can work on it any more.

rhelz 3y ago

I was kinda hoping there would be a link to where I could actually learn some cool stuff about mainframes…

exabrial 3y ago

I’d gladly work on this stuff if it were actually lucrative. There’s a secondary problem: they literally just don’t make things the way they used to. Nearly 100% of all SPAs i visit are busted in some manner, or break depending on the day of the week. Main frames and the culture that surrounds them is one of not breaking, ever, and maintaining backwards compatibility into eternity. There are js modules that measures their lts support in months. Most actual engineering has been lost out of modern software development: instead we just throw whatever was last month away for the latest redesign.

unixhero 3y ago

Open up the learning paths then. Trailhead.com from salesforce is an excellent learning platform they can copy. And open up the technology. Open the microcode generators, open up the operating systems. Civilians must be able to learn it. Not only enployees of banks, insurance and telcos.