Dealing with the stress of being a mainframer

 

While there isn’t a better job in the world than working with mainframes – after all, why do so many people do it? Especially as many of those people are over retirement age or getting quite close to it. But even so, the life of a mainframer isn’t without stress. I’m not talking about the threat of a ransomware attack or even simply ensuring that recovery processes can take place quickly and easily in the event of a file becoming corrupted or deleted. I’m thinking more of those interminable meetings with, sometimes, senior people who joke that mainframes are dinosaurs and believe that as soon as the company ditches them, the business will naturally go from strength to strength.

Now I’m not talking about how to change someone’s beliefs today. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments about why mainframes are cheaper and more secure than many other platforms. What I am going to talk about is how to unwind – how to destress – after a day or a week arguing with members of the flat-earth society (or at least that’s how it seems!).

Obviously, I use a laptop, a phone, and a tablet. Some of the apps I use reside in the cloud. I’m not saying that different IT platforms don’t have their role. It’s people who don’t recognize and acknowledge the role of the mainframe that I, and many other mainframers, find frustrating, irritating, and stressful.

So, what can you do to retain your equanimity? How can you return to your Zen-like peacefulness and calm after yet another encounter? Here are some thoughts.

The easiest and most straightforward way to relax is by breathing! Two very simple and effective techniques are 7-11 breathing and square breathing.

7-11 breathing involves breathing in for a count of 7, then breathing out for a count of 11. The important thing is to breath out for longer than you spend breathing in. If the timings seem too long, count faster! Most people feel calm after a few minutes with this technique.

With square breathing, you sit upright in a chair with both feet on the floor. Breath in for the count of four, hold your breath for the count of four, exhale for the count of four, and hold your breath for the count of four. Keep repeating the pattern until you feel relaxed.

If you know a meeting is going to be stressful, at home before the meeting, lie on your back on the floor and put one hand on your chest and one on your abdomen and simply breathe. As you relax, you should feel your abdomen rising and falling rather than your chest. This is what you want in order to become relaxed. 10 minutes of abdominal breathing is good. 30 minutes is better. If you can do this every day, it will help you stay relaxed in difficult situations.

Sometimes, coming out of a meeting where you are still feeling angry or upset, it can be useful to carry out grounding exercises. These provide a way to anchor you in the present. The idea behind it is to use your senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) to link your mind and body in the present moment and turn off any intrusive feelings. Some techniques that have been suggested for grounding include:

• Slowly, think of five things you can see. Then think of four things you can hear. Next find three things you can feel (eg your feet touching the floor). Then two things you can smell. And, finally, one thing you can taste.
• Talk about yourself. Say your name, your current age, where you are now, what you have done so far today, and what you plan to do next.
• Splash water on your face.
• Sip a cool drink of water.
• Hold a cold can or bottle of soft drink in your hands. Notice the coldness and the wetness on your hands. When you drink it, notice the bubbles and taste.
• Hold a mug of tea or coffee in both hands and feel its warmth. Then take small sips and really notice the tastes with each mouthful.
• Wear an elastic band on your wrist and gently flick it, so that you feel it spring back on your wrist. Notice the sounds you can hear and the sensations you feel when you do that.

Mindfulness, after some practice, provides techniques for a person to dissociate from what’s happening. For example, you can recognize how you feel at any instant and you can accept that that’s simply how you are feeling. That takes all the emotional power out of the feeling. You can also recognize that however you currently feel, that feeling won’t last forever, and will probably pass in a few seconds or so. (Some estimates have been quoted that an urge, eg for a cigarette or a bar of chocolate, last no more than eight seconds.) Using mindfulness techniques does require a certain amount of practice before it becomes easy for a person to use, but that training can be worth it.

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT therapy) calls this ‘defusion’ because it stops thoughts and feelings becoming completely fused with your attention or focus and becoming your reality.

NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) offers a number of techniques that people can learn to use to help them to stay calm. For example, anchoring is a very effective technique. You know how a smell or a tune can remind you of a particular place or time in your life. Anchoring is a bit like that. It’s also a bit like the bell and Pavlov’s dogs. A particular stimulus – that smell, tune, or bell – results in a particular response, eg salivating! In this case, the stimulus might be rubbing your earlobe, and the response might be you feeling very calm and in control. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the stimulus has to be learned, but, after that, rubbing your earlobe (or whatever stimulus you want to use) can make you feel very calm in any situation.

Another NLP technique is peripheral vision relaxation. The fovea in the eye is where most light is focused when looking at something (eg reading) and is associated with sympathetic nerves (associated with fight and flight) of the autonomic nervous system. This is where most of the cones are found, the light receptors that see colour. Outside this area are the rods, the light receptors for seeing shapes. These are associated with parasympathetic nerves associated with rest and digest. By using the brain to focus on the signals from these peripheral cones, it’s possible to move the body from fight-and-flight mode to rest-and-digest mode – and so become calmer.

Another NLP technique is to use the circle of excellence. With this, you imagine there is a circle on the floor in front of you that has all the skills and feelings you need to perform a particular task – like staying calm when talking to flat-earthers. You can even imagine that someone who you know is highly skilled has put all their skills in this invisible circle. Just step into the circle and feel what it’s like to be very calm and able to think of logical and quick answers to criticisms etc. Then you take your circle of excellence with you an use it whenever you need to.

Other de-stressing techniques you might use include going for a walk in the countryside (woodland is particularly good), progressive muscle relaxation, exercise or dancing, listening to music, stroking your dog, and there are many others.

Hopefully, these will help you to keep your cool, as you go into your next meeting.

Resolving that constant battle about the viability of the mainframe

You’ve just come out of yet another meeting where some new manager has pronounced the death of the mainframe and how all your organizations’ IT needs can be resolved by xxx. Over time, ‘xxx’ has been client/server computing, Linux servers, various midrange machines, outsourcing, and now the cloud. I’m sure there have been other ‘sure-fire’ cures as well.

Of course you argue the case for the mainframe – its speed, its security, how quickly it can do batch work, etc – but when people don’t even begin to know what they don’t know about mainframes, nothing can shake their belief that technology that has been around for a while must be old-fashioned. They ignore the fact that cars and aeroplanes have been around for a while too!

So, what if there were some strategy you could use to get the people in the room to agree? Suppose that you could get people who insist that their opinion is right and everyone else is wrong to work together? What if everyone could feel that they have been heard and their position appreciated by the others in the room? There’s a book by Lisa Earle McLeod, called “Triangle Of Truth: The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolving Conflicts Large and Small” that came out over ten years ago that suggests how this can be done.

The model proposed in the book is apparently based on celebrated thinkers such as Einstein, Buddha, Barack Obama, and even Elvis Presley, and resolves conflicts by not worrying about which side is right or wrong, but by looking for solutions. That leads to the triangle’s three corners – my truth, your truth, and a higher-level solution.

The key takeaways from the book are:

• The power of principles – even if other people in the meeting are reluctant to transform their mindset, stand-up alone.
• Expose yourself to danger – be like big players and take a risk. Winners aren’t afraid of defeat.
• Abandoning the extremes – forget about ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’, do what’s needed to reconcile with others. A concept is better than compromise.

This is what Buddha called the middle path. It honours the truth of both sides.

The book gives seven principles to bear in mind. They are:

• Principle 1: embrace ‘and’ – Successfully using the Triangle means eliminating either/or thinking. By using ‘and’, we allow ourselves to come up with new ideas.
• Principle 2: make peace with ambiguity – defending our own truth prevents us from hearing any other idea or side to the argument, making it impossible to implement the Triangle of Truth.
• Principle 3: hold space for other perspectives –ignoring the goals that are driving someone else prevents you from working as a team to get what you both want.
• Principle 4: seek higher ground – look beyond the conflict or issue on the table to see the bigger picture, considering the full context of the situation. There really are more than two choices. A new one will help everyone to achieve what they want.
• Principle 5: discern intent – any solutions proposed are thought by their proposer to be the best way to solve a problem. Try to understand the person’s intention – it was probably good.
• Principle 6: elevate others – ask ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions rather than ‘what’ and ‘when’ questions to help people think more deeply. This will help everyone to think more creatively, assimilate multiple ideas, uncover the core truths behind proposed solutions and, naturally, solve conflicts more effectively and without the drama.
• Principle 7: be the peace – be a peacemaker rather than just a peacekeeper. Embrace other ideas and assimilate conflicting ideas into a solution that surpasses the earlier ideas.

The message in the book is that using these techniques not only helps with potential conflicts at work, but can also be used with other groups one belongs to, and even with family relationships. In summary, the book suggests that people need to avoid either/or thinking, embrace ambiguity, and look at what you get when you the word ‘and’ to connect those separate ideas.

So, here we have a technique that will help to stop any battles before they start that might otherwise occur between mainframers and cloud specialists or distributed system experts or even the mobile team. No one side needs to start digging their heels in because a solution that’s works for the greater good will come out of using these techniques. It’s not even necessary for all sides to be aware of the triangle of truth – only one side does. However, I’m sure things would move forward faster if all the people taking part in the discussion were aware of the techniques laid out in the book and the underlying philosophy behind it.

I’d be interested to hear how anyone who tries this technique gets on. Personally, I quite like the ideas in the book.

AI and quantum computing – the Skynet scenario

In the original Terminator film, Skynet, an AI controlled defensive system, became self-aware at 2:14am EDT, on 29 August 1997. And that led to the frightening scenario in the film and all its sequels. I’m not really suggesting that we are all doomed. You know as well as I do that headlines are only there to grab your attention. What I am suggesting is that these emerging technologies (and like all emerging technologies, they’ve been around for a while) will make huge changes to our lives.

Let’s look back at personal computing. Many people can remember the clunky IBM PCs available in the early 1980s. You typed into them and remembered to save your work (usually). Nowadays, using Word or Google Docs, you type in, and it tells you if it thinks you have misspelled a word. It also suggests that your grammar may be wrong – you have used the wrong form of the verb to go with the subject of your sentence, The software has, in many ways, deskilled the job of writing. You no longer have rooms full of typists at companies. Most people no longer need a secretary to write their letters. It also means that teachers marking essays, shouldn’t be spending their time correcting grammar errors in their students’ work because the software should have done it already before the work was submitted. Teachers will be marking the content of the essay, the information it contains, and the application of the facts and the ideas.

In a similar way, when things like ChatGPT, Bard from Google, and Copilot from Microsoft, become commonly available, they will have a huge impact on the essays written by students. It will be possible to tell the AI what you want written and how many words, and the AI will write the essay. To begin with, these will need to be checked to ensure that the facts are all true (they aren’t always!), but that will only be half the story. The teacher marking the essay, will, probably, have already received 30 very similar essays from the other students in the class. What will be needed is for the students to show how those fact can be applied, and their own ideas. The simple regurgitation of facts won’t be enough. People will still write essays, but the important content will be different. I’m suggesting that things will have to change. And, slowly they will.

ChatGPT and the others are examples of Large Language Models (LLMs). These are AIs that can generate natural language texts from large amounts of data. Their responses make it seem like you are conversing with an intelligent piece of software. However, in many ways, they are simply choosing the most likely word to come next in a conversation or essay or poem, etc.

So, AIs could produce contracts for the merger of two companies. Both sides will use their own Ai to create very similar contracts. And those companies will use AIs to ensure that the contracts protect their investments. And, to begin with, qualified and experienced staff will need to double-check those contracts. What won’t be needed are the staff that usually write those contracts in the first place.

AI could write programs in whatever language you choose. And another AI could test whether that new program works with the existing applications on, for example a mainframe, without causing any problems. But, to begin with, expert programmers and experienced systems programmers will need to cast an eye over the code for any issues or anything that is missing. This is how the AI will learn.

The biggest issue, for some people, with AI is when the software creates artwork, for example a sonnet, a painting, or a work of fiction. Is the book, poem, or picture really art? Does that mean our definitions are going to have to change?

At the more practical level, AI could be used to perform a ransomware attack on your mainframe. It could also carry out the best pen test you’ve ever had on your system, and guide you through the steps you need to take to be as secure as possible. Again, this could lead to a dystopian future (like Terminator) because the figure often quoted is that 20 percent of cyberattacks come from disgruntled employees. Get rid of all employees and cut your risk of attack by a fifth!

All of that can take place on our existing computing platforms. What if you add quantum computing into the mix?

Quantum computers use chips that are housed in cooling units just above absolute zero (0^oK), where electrons can move through the superconductors with no resistance. They use qubits, which can simultaneously be a 1 or a 0. IBM says that a qubit places the quantum information it holds into a state of superposition, which represents a combination of all possible configurations of the qubit. Groups of qubits in superposition can create complex, multidimensional computational spaces. Complex problems can be represented in new ways in these spaces. In contrast, all current computing platforms use 0s and 1s to perform addition quite quickly. The bottom line is that quantum computers are hugely faster than conventional computers.

The one negative use of quantum computing that everyone is talking about is their ability to quickly decrypt encrypted data. What people conventionally think would take decades to decrypt, could be decrypted on a quantum machine in hours. That would make online banking a very risky business for everyone. It means that encrypted messages sent over the Internet could be read. It makes the world a very unsafe place. IBM recently took steps to make their mainframes quantum-safe – as far as possible.

On the more positive side, putting AI and quantum computing together would be brilliant for our health. It would be able to identify that we are taking more pain killer medication than usual and identify, from other sources, what our condition might be, and recommend which medical specialist to see for further tests.

It could control traffic flows on busy roads and in towns and cities. It could check planning applications meet local bylaws. So many mundane tasks, could be performed incredibly speedily by AI on quantum computers, and simply checked by qualified humans, that there would never be any need to wait for months for anything to happen again.

Moving forward further, it would become possible for AI running on quantum computers to control robotic equipment to perform very delicate operations on humans – like heart surgery. And, because it never gets tired, these could run 24 hours a day. No-one needs to wait for an operation.

As always, the future is uncertain, but there are many huge benefits of combining AI and quantum computing. But there will be misuse of the technology that needs to be confronted and controlled. I don’t believe Skynet will be become self-aware. I do believe that there will be huge changes in the way our children or grandchildren live their lives from the way we do currently.