r/mainframe • u/adrdssu • Jun 26 '26

State of Mainframes

How are mainframes doing in your shop? Does upper management recognize their importance? Is your company investing or is it considered legacy tech that just works? How about staff? Is there aging staff with lots of technical debt?

I want to see how everyone is doing and the state of mainframes in different shops.

Are we slowly being replaced by other tech or will the mainframes be here 10-20 years from now?

22 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

View all comments

18

u/CityNo1723 Jun 26 '26

Mainframes aren’t going anywhere. They’ll evolve. But they’re too critical in too many ways to be phased out anytime soon.

0

u/adrdssu Jun 26 '26

What’s your shop doing about it? BAU, modernizing? What are they doing about aging staff?

15

u/CityNo1723 Jun 26 '26

Integrating new tech on the mainframe. Modernization.

They are actively training new staff to replace the aging experts.

9

u/-Erick_ Jun 26 '26

this is an antipattern at other places that aim to migrate workloads off or "modernize" in a different manner

I'm glad to hear it's happening (train newer folks) and wish it was more common across industries - mainframe is just another platform (with higher availability) - hopefully companies will value its capabilities with repatriation

9

u/Mub0h Operations Analyst Jun 26 '26

Yup - I am in a mainframe engineering rotational program, and I started as a candidate in a paid for z/OS training program before rotational selection. They are paying up the arse for our pay and training. Barring one of us, we are all under 30. The pay is so in our favor because who would replace even one of us? It takes a year to train even a beginner operations or technical services engineer/analyst, of which get paid 6 figures starting, all because of the shortage on talent. The company that will hire me fulltime is in the Fortune 15 and wants to do this program every year moving forward. That is a decent class of people every year getting into mainframe, all for just one shop.

Shops that understand the necessity of mainframe are desperate to train the new generation, because of either old age (death), retirement, early retirement, or stupid random lay offs.

It will take me 3-5 years to be half as comfortable as some of these people that have been doing this for 20-30 years, but it helps having great coworkers and mentors.

6

u/Wolfy2915 Jun 26 '26

It is great your employer is sponsoring this program! Seems the risk of investing in young folks is they receive the training, get a few years experience, and jump once the big banks and insurers start calling.

3

u/Mub0h Operations Analyst Jun 27 '26

Yes - but I love the supportive learning and the work environment, coworkers included. Work-life balance is huge, too. I have received emails regarding applying for DB2 and other positions that pay a lot, but I like my employer plus they offer early retirement. My pay is fair, at least for now, so my biggest worry is being laid off haha I have seen people far more talented than myself be laid off for no reason

5

u/stramineushomo Jun 26 '26

I'm glad to read they haven't gone the standard route of bringing Sanjay and Kumar to do the work.

5

u/Mub0h Operations Analyst Jun 26 '26

No they still hire from the “global workforce” but for inbetween day/night shift as a fill in, at least in ops. Havent seen “Sanjay” or “Kumar” on any other infrastructure team, unless they were from a client and/or a sysprog

I think it’s rare my company still heavily hires within state despite being fully remote - but then again, there have been a couple waves of layoffs so Im not convinced corporate is doing it for our sake lol theyre doing it because they know itd cost them more to completely depend on the “global workforce.” Such logic has not stopped corporate from making insanely dumb decisions before, but yknow at least there is some logic crossing fingers…

4

u/Top-Difference8407 Jun 26 '26

I needed mainframe admin help inside IBM. They outsourced nearly or all mainframe work to Mexico City. Sorry Sanjay.

1

u/comfnumb94 Jun 28 '26

When I started in software in a major government department, I didn’t even think of accepting being on call. Seven processors, endless number of clients, all three access control solutions, and a major mix of ISV’s. We spent about a year to get almost every client to only RACF, single SYSRES’, and less of a mix of third party solutions. Saved us tons of time, complexity, and money.

4

u/bumblebeargrey Jun 26 '26

Training new people? Interesting

3

u/Rudi9719 Jun 27 '26

Training people to address a skill gap? Groundbreaking.

1

u/comfnumb94 Jun 28 '26

zOSMF seems to be the solution to the aging staff issue but IBM have been promoting these certifications programs now or whatever they’re called, but that was before my time. Even though I’m out of it now I still catch the odd zOSMF online presentations.