Trouble getting new mainframe staff?

Many of us can remember a time when the machine room was buzzing. There could be as many as 20 operators on a shift, busily loading tapes and changing boxes of 11-inch multi-line paper in the printer. And outside the machine room were the programmers and others who kept everything going. I am talking about the days of punch cards and even paper tape as a way of inputting a program.

But that was all a long time ago. Somehow, organizations forgot all about their mainframes as times changed and people began to use laptops and mobile phones. The number of operators needed on a shift plummeted to none at all as the idea of a lights-out environment took hold. That’s not to say that mainframes weren’t still being used, just that DASD storage got bigger and fewer (eventually almost none) tapes needed changing. No-one used punched cards to enter a program, it was all done on-screen. And printers tended to reside locally – and eventually very little printing was needed.

CICS, IMS, Db2 and z/OS itself continued to be improved and extended. And the days of a massive piece of hardware with a bank of flashing lights and switches evolved into something that could be rack mounted like any other server. Without the rowdiness of a room full of operators and the sci-fi-ness of a box with flashing lights, people simply thought less and less about the power and the importance of the mainframe. It gradually faded from many people’s consciousness – like a relative that you’ve not seen for a number of years.

However, the mainframe was still there and was doing a very important job. IBM tells us that 67 Fortune 100 enterprises still use mainframes. Included in those figures are 45 of the top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 telcos, and seven of the top 10 retailers. As you know, mainframes didn’t disappear.

So, as we came to the 2019, mainframes were still doing their vitally important job, but most column inches published online and in print were focused on cloud, and mobile, and web. And then in 2020, the world was suddenly working from home as the pandemic hit. And many people used this time to re-evaluate their life. There were a lot of mainframe professionals who were getting near (or even past) their ideal retirement age. And when they looked at their life – their work/life balance – they came to the conclusion that there were better things that they could do rather than go to meetings and try to battle for the importance of the mainframe to an organization. They could, instead, be playing golf, seeing their grandchildren, learning to play the piano again, and so much more. And once the crisis seemed to be over, a significant number of people retired.

But that’s alright, those companies thought, we have loads of people in the IT team, they can take over! The problem is that most of those people had no mainframe experience. And things like CICS and IMS are very complex pieces of software to understand. The concept of the rolling 4-hour average is not a concept that makes sense to people used to working with cloud-based applications. Very quickly, organizations are realizing that they need mainframe experts looking after the mainframe.

One option that companies might think of looking at is using youngsters, who could be trained by the company’s mainframe experts before they retired. The problem with that idea is that many youngsters are not entering the job market. Following the pandemic, they have decided to stay in education for longer than similar cohorts in 2018 or 2019 would have done. And that means there are fewer young people available for work now as well as older staff leaving. And that can be quite a problem for many of these Fortune 100 companies looking for mainframe staff. And, as we all know, a shortage of staff can lead to an increase in the salaries that the remaining staff can demand.

The problem isn’t just with large organizations and the results of the pandemic. For a long time, universities have stopped teaching COBOL in favour of Python, JavaScript, Go, etc. But these lead to youngsters joining an already crowded job market. Somehow, these youngsters need to be shown that their employment prospects and their salary expectations will be much higher if they were to learn mainframe. The problem is that. like so many other people, colleges probably don’t know much about mainframes.

IBM and Broadcom do have training programmes to help train and on-board the next generation of mainframe talent. These programmes help to encourage younger people into the world of the mainframe.

And IBM has been making the mainframe more open for non-mainframers. It’s possible to use Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VSCode) on a mainframe, as well as Java. There’s Zowe, which is an open-source tool that allows non-mainframers to treat mainframes like any other servers. Zowe makes CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, and Urban Code available to developers, as well as tools like Ansible and SaltStack. IBM has also produced specific tools to allow non-mainframers to use the mainframe. For example, z/OS Management Facility (z/OSMF) provides system management functionality in a task-oriented, web browser-based UI with integrated user assistance. There’s also Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU), which provides a runtime to support the execution of automation tasks on z/OS through Java, Python, and shell commands.

These are all great initiatives, and they will all help organizations to overcome the current difficulty of finding and recruiting mainframe staff. Perhaps, the only real solution is for every mainframer to go out there and blow the trumpet for mainframes: to really let people know what mainframes can do. And, hopefully, non-mainframers will hear the message and boost the number of people available to work on mainframes.