[bobbydreamer]

Some common lines you hear from mainframers.

Deprecation is a new term in mainframe.

Don't fix what's not broken

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It's a common saying that mainframers don't try to learn new tech. Well that saying goes two ways, person saying has really tried to learning mainframe and work on it for a month. Actually there isn't much to learn other than couple of languages COBOL, REXX, JCL and SAS. Other than that it's just ISPF interfaces.

Mainframers actually have to learn tech once and then go on to learn business logics and business domain. Isnt that actually good when comparing to always learning new tech and writing migrating programs to support existing interface in new Lang but not too much about business you are working on.

On the other hand mainframers do spend on learning and upskilling but in mainframe itself. There are lots of IBM Usergroups like IDUG for instance which is related to Db2, being a DBA that's a very useful training programme for me.

COBOL codes are highly modularized to do one or couple of functions to my knowledge and there are definitely coding standards each shop maintains.

Having a bunch of nodeJs cloud functions i get an email from Google saying that I need to migrate my NodeJs or it will stop functioning and while trying to migrate i find couple of modules are not longer supported and I need recode. Here I am not adding any new features just trying to make it work as before with new library which I have to find, learn, test and analyse does it suit then recode. All this costs time which you don't have to do in mainframe. You can say why not run in a VM, then what's the point running in cloud.

Mainframe is not a legacy system. IBM introduces a new machine every 3-4 years and send their sales team to visit corps and run presentations :) . Currently IBM has changed their billing style, it's not flat or peak hour, it's custom. It's the smallest footprint in your data center.

What mainframe actually did is, job separation. So in a career a person will sort of become an expert in their line or software. He will know all the ins and outs. For example a RACF security person will not know about Db2 and how it functions only part he knows is what interfaces with RACF. Same with CICS, MQ.... From application/dev team they get to know business like in a requirement meeting when business talks devs will be mapping business with program modules they had to make a change.

In mainframe people get to specialize.