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Mainframe = Youth
There is something interesting happening in the world of mainframe marketing and psychology. Increasingly, journalists are associating youth with mainframes. Youth is framing the mainframe.
Why not? When you think of an enterprise technology the usual association marketers try and imply is experience. For example, "if you choose Java you will have access to many experienced programmers". Youth is not usually considered a good in itself. Looking for a job, what is the first question they ask: "How much experience do you have?"
We all know that student choices impact future technology rollouts which is one obvious reason technology vendors pour so much money into education. IBM is a prime example.
But youth itself is not usually what the education push is about. The association is usually with skills, rather than youth, per se. "Youth" then, is available to be tagged as a technology value, and strangely enough its the mainframe folks doing so.
In an earlier post on mainframe blog I pointed out that when I started covering the mainframe market I wanted to appear older than I was, not younger. There was an implicit idea that youth was a bad thing. So much for legacy boy.
Perceptions have changed dramatically though, and recently very rapidly too.
Stephen Shankland talks of a rejuvenation. What does that mean? "To make young again".
Meanwhile Boas Betzler's first post was called "jugendjahre", which as I understand it means "youth years".
We have IBM and its SHARE user community putting forward the idea of "zNextGeneration" - which to me just sounds like the next generation with a French accent. :-) SHARE is now 50 years old but its targeting a youthful audience.
Words though are never enough. So here are pictures of mainframe youth, on an IBM site called "new faces".
Here are some stories focusing on the latest mainframe news
eWeek
Infoworld ("young in the headline, again)
Computerworld (SHARE Q&A)
ZDNet SOA blog
Maybe its just that IBM is making the running in August, traditionally pretty thin for IT news, but who would have expected IBM to be able to yoke the concepts of mainframe and youth together?
This is PR mastery, Rovian in its simplicity. It almost doesn't matter any more whether the mainframe population is ageing... if perceptions are otherwise. War heros become cowards, and mainframes becomes youthful.
Eternal youth, of course, is an aspirational value for all of us (over the age of 20 that is). Maybe its true that mainframes will never die.
| by James Governor | August 23, 2005 Permalink |
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Comments
You're right, James, there are some big changes underway. SHARE may be predominantly grey but it has a youthful spring in its step.
I think youth has always been valued by employers - at least some youthful qualities. Any IT manager worth their salt will be looking out for the young upstart with the mental agility to move around and work with different tools and technologies and gain a real understanding of how technology supports the business. Of course, many young recruits are as conservative as their older colleagues, and are more comfortable sticking with what they have learnt at college - which for the last 15 years or so has not often been MVS.
zNext Gen is happening not before time, and it will be a real marketing achievement if the mainframe's technical rejuvenation - which of course has been underway for some time - gives rise to a corresponding wave of youthful enthusiasm in our universities.
IBM's Academic Initiative and zSeries Scholars Program are gaining momentum now, but it's surprising how long it has taken to happen. When I was working closely with AFCOM (a US mainframe computer operations user group) in 2001, the group was trying to highlight the problem of diminishing skills. At that time, only four years ago, it was hard to find anyone in IBM (or many users for that matter!) who accepted that this was a problem. Clearly the skills issue has now made it onto the agenda and I would guess that it is being raised during sales discussions.
I think these initiatives will create a big change in the perspective of new graduates. It may still be tricky, though, to cope with the relative vacuum in mainframe skills at the thirtysomething level once the elder members of the community start to retire in droves.
Posted by: Mark Lillycrop | Aug 23, 2005 10:39:57 AM
And we're seeing an urgent need for more data center specialists across the US - with tier one employers -- over seventy open positions in CT and MN at www.datacentercareers.com
Posted by: Tara Johnson | Aug 23, 2005 12:10:19 PM
James, I can tell you that there's a huge emphasis in IBM on the Academic Initiative (zSeries in particular) right now. The customer interest is huge. I've done a few presentations on it lately, and spoken to numerous customers, and the interest level is universally high. A friend of mine is a tech support mgr for a large IBM mainframe account, and she was very emphatic about the dearth of skills in the pipeline, especially those with systems programmer talent.
One of my pet projects is building z talent within our own ranks, AND in the outside world. There's a lot of attention on both fronts. IBM is determined to fix this problem.
Posted by: Bill | Aug 24, 2005 11:16:04 AM
You would be doing the younger generation a disservice by encourage then into a mainframe career.
Large numbers of these jobs are going offshore. IBM Services is a leader in this field.
Posted by: Dave Woolley | Aug 24, 2005 4:44:52 PM
a disservice, Dave Woolley?
how so? just two comments above is a comment from Tara Johnson that there are 70 mainframe jobs on their books right now.
Jobs in other fields are just as likely to be outsourced to other geographies. many of the enterprises I speak to have no intention of shipping off all their mainframe capacity to India, whatever IGS does.
who is most threatened by Indian outsourcing? IGS, for one.... Wipro and Infosys are not playing around.
besides- one of the key points being made with the mainframe blog is that modern mainframe skills are not some dead end roach motel. on the contrary - Linux, virtualization, Java, SOA, are all hot trends playing out in the Zecosystem. Security discipline, cryptography, shared memory databases, are all cutting edge approaches. which just happen to have 40 years of maturity behind them in the mainframe sphere...
Am I suggesting that graduates learn how to program assembler and only build to CICS, with no other skills and stop there? Absolutely not.
The pendulum is faster than ever, but lets seperate core skills from particular implementations. Some people that three years or so swore Java was the answer to every problem are now learning and recommending Ruby on Rails...
No graduate today can expect a job for life in any business or technology area.
Mainframe computer science though is by definition advanced computer science, likely covering secure scalability, hugely intensive I/o and so on. the skills are transferable.
there are plenty of people out there that know how to build systems that are not maintable at scale. those that truly understand computer science discipline should be in a reasonable position, as SOA opens up back end services to new end points, driving capacity up.
Posted by: james governor | Aug 25, 2005 6:20:24 AM
ok, hope not to ruffle too many feathers here, but i find two things missing: first: a forum for quick postings of questions and answers rather than musings and history, however glorious it is. Second, how about a link to drive that 'fridge' virtually? there must be some kind of system for wannabies to crash ;-).
Posted by: greg | Aug 25, 2005 12:34:06 PM
For anyone who knows how change occurs in academia, would know IBM's academic initiative is scratching the surface. Students, young or old, don't control what is taught in mainstream CS programs. How many schools would dare drop a conceptual approach that teaches students hopefully how to think, versus requiring them to focus on a specific operating environment that prepares them for a narrow job band?
If IBM were smart, they would stop worrying about press releases around the academic initiative and go after career colleges who are actually in the business of job training.
Posted by: bill | Aug 26, 2005 12:17:39 AM
First of all, the usual disclaimer: These are my own opinions and are in no way intended to reflect those of my employer (a very large manufacturer of mainframe computers!!).
As I read through the IBM press release I cannot help but feel that the zNextGen initiative is predominantly aimed at making the general development community more aware of the application related capabilities of this unique platform. I quote from the recent press release:
"As the original open source computing community, SHARE is excited to work with IBM to help provide the next generation of enterprise computing professionals the skills and connections they need to be successful in the new, more open world of Linux, Java technology, and SOA on the mainframe,"
Nowhere in that statement do I see a commitment to foster the development of the strong technical internals knowledge and low level skills that are now, and will continue to be required in order to fully optimize and utilize the mainframe z/OS platform.
Whilst the real money is surely to be made in the applications arena, without the availability of the underlying technical skill set the (z/OS) mainframe must continue to face a dubious future. Even though IBM continues to attempt to wrap z/OS with a new face and move away from the old 3270 based interfaces for low level tasks, both IBM and it's customer base will continue to require that low level z/OS skill set in order to develop the type of tools and technical applications that will be needed to run these systems by the 'general masses'.
I do not believe that one should confuse promoting the platform and it's unique application related architecture with addressing the needs for future low level technical and architectural skills, however that seems to me at least to be the case here. I sincerely hope that I am wrong in that respect but until I hear a resounding desire from upcoming IT students to become MVS sysprogs I shall remain doubtfull at best.
Posted by: Dave Ellis | Aug 26, 2005 4:08:19 PM
Dave Woolley wrote: "You would be doing the younger generation a disservice by encourage then into a mainframe career."
Tell that to the customers I talk to daily, where every one, without fail, gets all giddy when I tell them about the Academic Initiative. They all want to know where to sign up to get universities to deliver them college hires that know the mainframe. They are desparate for mainframe skills.
bill wrote: "If IBM were smart, they would stop worrying about press releases around the academic initiative and go after career colleges who are actually in the business of job training."
They (we) are. Both full-blown computer science programs and trade school type programs. And believe me, the folks working on this program are well-versed in how universities build their curricula and what it takes to get a class added (and it is NOT a simple process). Institutions - those that offer CS degrees and those that teach job-training type programs - are interested in making their graduates "hireable". That is precisely why they are considering teaching mainframe material...because that's what big corporations are looking for.
Posted by: Bill | Aug 26, 2005 11:56:53 PM
I'd like to make two comments based on the posts and comments here.
First, Znextgen seems to be off to a good start. The first meeting at SHARE, where we expected maybe a dozen people to show up, had over 40.
Second, while the publicity may focus on application development, have no fear that the underlying, in the weeds, technical underpinnings will be ignored. As long as SHARE is around, there will be in depth sessions covering those subjects. Just look at the assembler boot camp offered at SHARE. Lots of attendees and not all "grey beards" either (and no offense intended to our grey bearded instructors, Mike and John :-) ).
Robert Rosen
SHARE President
Posted by: Robert Rosen | Aug 29, 2005 3:19:57 PM
hey robert thanks for the comment
Posted by: james governor | Aug 31, 2005 7:34:22 AM
The mainframe is not evil, but COBOL is...
Posted by: James | Dec 22, 2005 6:00:31 AM
I've been taking a course on mainframe basics (ISPF, SMS, SDSF, MVS, z/OS, etc) and I'm from the distributed systems world. I've been managing Linux/Unix servers for 5 years now and I'm 23 years old.
Now my question is: how do I become a mainframe system programmer without having to start as mainframe operator ?
I've been told that I've to start as an operator and then grow but what about all my previous experience managing complex distributed systems. Should I throw that away to move to the mainframe world ? I don't think so and I'm looking for an answer to that question.
Due to the lack of advanced courses, and the need for previous experience, the path to the mainframe world seems a bit blurred to me. I've seen all kinds of options for people begining in the IT field and how they should consider a mainframe career. But what about someone already working in IT that thinks the mainframe world now looks interresting? What are the entry points ? Any help is very welcome :)
Posted by: Giovanni P. Tirloni | Aug 4, 2006 7:59:33 PM
I've been taking a course on mainframe basics (ISPF, SMS, SDSF, MVS, z/OS, etc) and I'm from the distributed systems world. I've been managing Linux/Unix servers for 5 years now and I'm 23 years old.
Now my question is: how do I become a mainframe system programmer without having to start as mainframe operator ?
I've been told that I've to start as an operator and then grow but what about all my previous experience managing complex distributed systems. Should I throw that away to move to the mainframe world ? I don't think so and I'm looking for an answer to that question.
Due to the lack of advanced courses, and the need for previous experience, the path to the mainframe world seems a bit blurred to me. I've seen all kinds of options for people begining in the IT field and how they should consider a mainframe career. But what about someone already working in IT that thinks the mainframe world now looks interresting? What are the entry points ? Any help is very welcome :)
Posted by: Giovanni P. Tirloni | Aug 4, 2006 7:59:37 PM
Am planning to get into an IBM Mainframe career. What would you have as a suggestion for me..? Pls advise.
What are IBM Mainframe's advantages as we look it as a career for youngsters
Posted by: Berth Lawrence | Feb 18, 2008 2:04:21 AM
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