Posted on 04/18/2016 3:09:17 AM PDT by AdmSmith
Mainframe systems are still the backbone of much of today's IT infrastructure. Yet, finding IT talent to maintain these systems, and the COBOL and Fortran languages that support them, is becoming increasingly difficult.
The trouble is that all of the people who know how to maintain these systems -- while preparing to bolt on next-gen apps -- are aging out of the workforce, and there are no Millennials eagerly lining up to take their spots. Mainframes require knowledge of COBOL and Fortran, languages that are not considered particularly sexy these days. It's not hard to see why no one wants to learn these languages. Mainframe is dead. Long live the cloud. Right?
(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
When were mainframe systems ever “cool”?
A good software engineer can write FORTRAN in any language.
My first programming language in Electrical Engineering School was FORGO...the Daddy of FORTRAN! Ah, the Sixties!
If you want to make a recent computer science graduate mad, tell them that OO is just regular programming in a different pair of pants - cargo pants to carry around all the baggage of a class.
You and me both. I did programming for a large health insurance company. We did our CICS work in Telon MVS using the old IBM TSO dumb terminals. Ah, those were the days! The fast routines were written in assembler.
I also did a stint with the statistical group there, writing batch COBOL programs that would take 7 years’ worth of claims data and crunch the numbers to produce reams of reports for the actuarial analysts. Some of those programs took days to run, heh heh! My pride and joy was a 7-layer array.
Oh, speaking of the jobs that took days; I remember putting CHECKPOINT RESTART in the JCL in case there was a problem somewhere. That way, if it croaked on tape number 130 of 145, they didn’t have to restart the whole think on tape number 1.
I learned FORTRAN II (that’s 2 not 11) in college in ‘64. Ran it on an IBM 1620. You had to load the compiler deck of several hundred cards through the card reader. A guy in the class dropped the compiler more than once. He got very proficient at operating the card sorter.
LOL! You chose your screen name well!
Mainframe operators, themselves, are dying off like dinosaurs because everyone went on this cloud kick and yet the cloud is, IMO, just as vulnerable. Stripping away all the jargon and bullsh— techies love to babble, a mainframe requires sunk costs in a physical system that must be constantly updated and is vulnerable because it exists in one physical location. A cloud requires paying to outsource this to another company and is vulnerable because the business must access their important data through an internet connection that isn’t (and probably never will be) 100% secure from hackers and terrorists.
I guess enough businesses have been stung by the cloud that they are rebuilding their mainframes again which, at least, the business has more physical control and access over their data.
The wisest approach, which I have seen in action, is a redundancy approach where data centers exist in more than one location and the cloud is used as a backup storage location as part of a disaster recovery plan, meaning you have a mainframe that does the primary work, a second physical mainframe in another city that can take over for the primary during maintenance and physical emergencies (hurricanes, for example) and a third backup of data in a cloud system should both mainframes be affected at one time.
This triple redundancy is expensive but it is the wisest approach for any business where their data is their lifeblood.
This COBOL programmer ready to come out of retirement. Any takers?
I remember that Star Trek game! It was great.
Are you saying I could go back to work as a COBOL programmer?
A company I was working for fired all its COBOL and Fortran programmers and hired Satyam. That was exciting.
Ah, the 1620. Checkstop!
I programmed in IBM S370 Assembler language for 12 years... couldn’t find work after Y2K.
Started my own business.
Would like to get back into programming if this is true.
I agree. When I worked for the insurance company, we had the first two (this was waaaay before cloud architecture).
The disaster recovery plan required daily interim and weekly full backups of the system to be made and transported to a cave at a distant location.
Every six months, we practiced disaster recovery, and I participated. We'd travel to the remote site where the second physical mainframe was located, and were required to get those backups out of the cave and have the entire system restored, tested, and fully running (i.e., "paying" claims) within three days of the disaster. It was kind of cool to do. Lots of coffee.
I made pretty good money doing Y2K work for the government, rewriting their COBOL programs. After that I had to switch over to doing IV&V work. Meh.
My wife was a Cobol programmer before we had kids. Do you think anyone would notice a 28 year gap in her resume?
I spent 20 years coding Assembler and Macro CICS on IBM mainframes, along with some COBOL and JCL and the rest of the mainframe toolbox. I still list it on my resume and I’ve noticed an uptick in hits on that skill set in the last couple of years. I’ve also noticed that these “desperate” IT departments are willing to pay a whopping $40 an hour for mainframe talent. So the need obviously isn’t critical yet.
The problem is not so much the older programming languages like COBOL, but that many of the old programs are very poorly written; especially if written before the concept of structured programmer were made popular. Surviving code is likely (a) actually good code, or (b) bad code that was patched enough to limp thru most of the logical conditions encountered.
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