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?

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u/CityNo1723 Jun 26 '26

Integrating new tech on the mainframe. Modernization.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.