I work in the technical sales part of CA Technologies with responsibility for 12 people who are experts in various mainframe products. I’ve been at CA for nearly 12 years, but before working at CA I’ve had various jobs. For the purpose of this article, the job that is important is my first job after leaving University which was working at General Motors UK, firstly as a trainee Cobol Programmer then as a trainee MVS Systems Programmer. Before I go into that however, I need to explain why I’m writing this article.
It has been clear for some years now that mainframes are not going to disappear as quickly as was being predicted towards the end of the last century. It was thought for many reasons that they would be replaced by other platforms which would be more agile and cheaper. Without going into the whole debate about mainframes versus any other platform, we can all agree and observe that they are still here and that for most large companies, they will continue to be here for several years to come, the exact “end date” is not really known. So this leaves organizations that still rely on mainframes with a time-bomb based on the fact that many of their mainframe experts will be retired and there has not been any real planning to mitigate the problem. The company I work for is doing it’s best in investing in changing the way products are installed and how they are used to make them easier for less experienced people to use them, but there still seems to be a problem in that the platform is considered dreary. I’m often being asked at customer meetings and conferences “how can we make the mainframe sexy”? But was it ever sexy?
So let’s go back in time to when the IBM Mainframe was one of the few platforms available in large-scale IT shops, for me this was the early 80s. I left University with a degree in Accounting and Computer Science, but being in the UK, the IT side of the degree was based around ICL Mainframes which were not really adopted globally but also were really nothing like the IBM Mainframe. In fact I still recall the shock of realizing how much power the IBM had compared to even the supercomputer we were running at the University. The fact is, that I knew nothing about IBM Mainframes, their assembler language, the way software was installed, the interactivity of TSO and ISPF, in short, I did not sign up because of their “sexiness”, but it was a job that would exploit and build on my knowledge and that I was considered capable of doing. Back in the 80s, as is the case now, not many people outside of the immediate environment of the computer room and the technical departments really knew what a mainframe was and how reliant on them we have all become. My parents and family to this day still do not really know.
So whilst everyone is now more aware of IT and how we depend on it, the general population sees IT as being iPads, laptops and servers, but apart from the odd film that mentions mainframes, it’s not a platform that is embedded in the general psyche and therefore not appreciated. The challenge is how to make such an invisible platform sexy. I don’t think you can, and I don’t think it ever was. My observations from my early career is that people got into mainframes more by accident then by design. I did not follow a traditional path, I was lucky enough that GM was running an apprenticeship program for graduates, to maintain high standards and to ensure everyone worked with the same methodologies. Many people got into mainframe when companies were looking for trainee operators to work shifts and this also goes some way to explaining why we are a male dominated industry. Finding women who were comfortable working shifts was difficult. The brightest or more ambitious operators would end up moving into other roles, some ended up as Ops Analysts, some as Sys Progs, some as DBAs etc. The whole process of going from trainee operator to qualified sys prog could take several years.
So we didn’t get into the job because it was sexy, it was career progression. The sexy part comes when you are mastering your job. This may seem perverse to a lot of people, but I loved the mental challenge of creating assembler code or maintaining existing code. I loved the challenge of installing and learning new products or new versions of the products. I would attend many product related user groups where I would enjoy telling a colleague about a feature of a product he had not discovered or implemented, we all had time in those days to really fine tune our skills and this boosted self-esteem and a sense of achievement. It’s hard to make someone understand this perspective that hasn’t already experienced it, and this is the real challenge we face with getting new blood into the industry. In my opinion we live in a world of instant gratification. I observe that most teenagers are not interested in developing careers and working up to a good pay grade, mentioning two or three years to get to a point of being qualified fills them with dread, but is it not the same in other professions?
For example, we are suffering from a lack of skilled tradespeople in the UK. Suggest to the average teenager that they should become a plumber and you will be laughed at. I don’t believe we have a problem just with mainframes, but with any trade. The reason that we see more people willing to work on servers is that more people are familiar with PCs and servers and are partially skilled so that they can start working in a semi-qualified capacity almost immediately.
One of the things that might drive more people to our platform is for better promotion of the platform, the longevity of it and that this amounts to good, well paid careers into the future. I also think that the larger organizations should start to merge their mainframe departments with their non-mainframe departments. A career in IT should include the mainframe, after all it’s part of the Enterprise IT Infrastructure. Rather than looking for ways of how to make it sexy we should be looking at ways to de-stigmatize. How do we do this? Any ideas welcome.