Interesting that the article says nothing about salaries and available positions.<p>And, also, at the end, the article mentions that Fujitsu is finishing with mainframes in 10 years.<p>Young people are smarter than going aboard a sinking ship.
“32 percent of organizations with a mainframe hired 11–20 mainframe related roles last year, while 35 percent filled more than 20 positions.”<p>This doesn’t sound like a whole lot.
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.<p>Once market builds an interesting compelling offer to mainframe, enterprises will leave IBM as fast as possible.
I’d gladly work on this stuff if it were actually lucrative.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Industry starts with the customers and the customers are trying to squeeze out costs as much as possible, shooting themselves in the foot.<p>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.<p>I emailed their hiring service about it once and their response was essentially "take it up with someone else."
Open up the learning paths then.
Trailhead.com from salesforce is an excellent learning platform they can copy.<p>And open up the technology.
Open the microcode generators, open up the operating systems.<p>Civilians must be able to learn it. Not only enployees of banks, insurance and telcos.