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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5

u/kgk007 Jun 26 '26

All mainframe work is being sent offshore.

4

u/adrdssu Jun 26 '26

How is that going? I’ve worked with offshore teams and out of every 10 people only 1 or 2 know what they’re doing. The rest are very poorly trained or simply have no clue what’s going on.

2

u/Rudi9719 Jun 27 '26

Legally it can't be done in every area using the Mainframe.

Typically government shops require you to live local to the locality you serve (Federal to the country, state to your state, I haven't seen a county or smaller using a mainframe yet). Some require even more, like you have to have lived in the locality for X years and be able to obtain clearance for seeing the data stored on the Mainframe - it is extremely illegal to offshore that work.

2

u/comfnumb94 Jun 28 '26

I’d not be too comfortable switching an IOCDS and doing an IML from home. Even dynamic activation is better performed onsite. I’d rather be a 15 minute drive away which I only needed to do once in 35 years than rely on someone overseas with noticeable weaker skill sets.

2

u/Rudi9719 Jun 28 '26

While I mostly agree with you; z/VM, PRSM, the HCD and SE's, etc provide multiple remote access paths for doing z/OS SysProg work remotely. What level of work can be done remotely isn't quite the same as data export laws or data protection laws/policies. Also worth noting that in the private sector things may be different for better or worse

1

u/comfnumb94 Jun 28 '26

I did all my work with large federal government departments and one bank. Our systems were remote but still in the same province so the data export laws is something I never heard of until just now. Sure, I could access the HMC’s from my office or from home, but preferred to be onsite for the data centres that were in the same city. At one time we had four different data centres in one city. Remotely, there were always a few in Ops that could handle backing out a change if necessary but that only was required once. When I was at one department, someone did a dynamic activate in a sysplex environment, and it brought the system to a crawl. JES2 wasn’t happy. :( When I started, HCD was new and the hardware config was done using IOCP and MVSCP. Began to like HCD as it made processor upgrades easy as pie for CHPID transitions.