I think the top-voted answer here is totally off. In c2008, during college, I worked at IBM on mainframes for internships and co-ops. I worked on the Omegamon

I think the top-voted answer here is totally off. In c2008, during college, I worked at IBM on mainframes for internships and co-ops. I worked on the Omegamon products on z/OS. Later I worked at Fidelity, where I was minimally involved with mainframe programming. First, mainframes are awesome from an architectural perspective. As one example: when you run a program, you must (I'm simplifying a bit) specify exactly which files it is allowed to access. Moreover, when you create those files, they aren't allowed to grow infinitely - OS will enforce a maximum rate at which a file can grow, and a maximum file size. Or, mainframes have been doing virtual machines for decades. In fact, the only sane way to run a mainframe is to slice it up and run VMs on it. "zVM" is written in assembly and runs z/OS VMs. Nowadays it also runs RHEL VMs. I hear they're putting Intel CPUs in mainframes to run Windows VMs too. There's more, but I just want to illustrate that the granularity from a security perspective is fantastic. There are tons of technical and features that, in my view, would be very interesting to the computer crowd. So why aren't young people interested? First, nobody knows what mainframes are, except that they are dinosaurs and old and slow and whatever. Sun used to give universities pallets of computers running Unix - so guess what university students learned! IBM is trying to bring awareness with their Master the Mainframe competition (which is fun!) or sponsoring Senior Project courses throughout the country. The OP is right that mainframes aren't available to learn on. And they're so different from the concepts we are familiar with that it is difficult to jump in. "Learn z/OS The Hard Way?" "Codecademy: OMVS Edition" Do realize that every time you swipe your credit card, you are very likely hitting a mainframe in a bank somewhere. Talk about throughput. The OP is correct in that if you're not working for IBM writing their mainframe products, you're probably at an awful soul-sucking bank writing COBOL. And really, the COBOL itself is probably not as bad as the fact that nobody knows it and these banks are notoriously bad at documentation or mentoring young people to bring them up to speed. Honestly working at a bank sucks. But banks user mainframes, and banks == bad, and mainframes == slow (somehow), so they are a no-go. If you do work for IBM on their mainframe teams, those guys are honestly the smartest engineers I have ever worked with. They're all, well, old, but they know C and assembly (lots of mainframe software is written in those languages) inside and out. They understand networks. How to increase throughput. If your webapp crashes, nobody cares. If your bank's mainframe has a segfault you are fucked. But then you are working in a very specific part of a very large company. Many young people work at IBM and are content there! They recruit heavily from my alma mater. But perhaps the types of young folks who are on HN, stackoverflow, etc are not really interested in working at IBM, much less learning about an esoteric technology. It will only keep you employable in a narrow (and soul-sucking) part of the industry.