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open source desktop cross platform software is amazing

Where can I attend the zos mainframe programmer course .. I am zos mainframe experience for 8yrs And wanna upgrade my position

I would recommend participating in Master the Mainframe when you are in school. t's a program sponsored by IBM for students to learn about the mainframe and do some challenges in z/OS. I took 2 semesters of z/OS COBOL in college in 2019 and a semester of DB2 for z/OS. Though we have a mainframe where I work, (not at my site but at corporate) I ended up as a VMWare / windows admin, and later a Cisco admin. And Cisco of course is all command line for much of their products.

Amazing video

Great video

Well done..Clear and to the point. 7min of pertinent info to get one started in 7 minutes. These things are usually 45min of bla bla to explain 7minutes of info. Thanks

It’s 1990s: Two worst advice given were: COBOL will be obsolete, don’t waste your time. 2nd Mainframes will be replaced by servers. 2024: Regrets 😅

Mainframes will not die.. but mainframe jobs will.. you wont get job security, no good pay, no permanent jobs .. stay away

Thank You...

I did mainframe for 12 years. Switched to mobile apps and web dev for 12 years. Now, I’m thinking of moving back to mainframe. Better job security. You don’t have to spend countless hours learning the latest hot technologies to try to stay relevant.

Working on a mainframe does not always mean you are using cobol. I have been coding SAS on a mainframe for 25 years.

Mainframes are the back-end of the business world. Microcomputers are the pretty front-end.

My opinion is that in a few years they will have to go to retirement homes and beg a few 90 years old to please come back to the area.The AS/400 field is even worse .Many are in their 70s

I worked on the IBM mainframe for 45 years and retired 2 years ago. A year after I retired I was made an offer to come back part time because of my assembler knowledge, yes even assembler is still in demand. I have remained retired.

My mainframe experience began in 1976 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It was limited to programming in PL/I on an IBM VS2 using paper tape and punch cards, I believe. After my mother developed cataracts, I withdrew from school to help her. The following school year, I decided not to return to Miami University. Instead, I chose to attend Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, because they had the IBM VM (Virtual Machine)/370 Release 6 mother wasn't happy about my decision because it had a reputation as a party school. While I did go to some parties, I studied much more with a 3.85 gpA for my 104 quarter hours I took every available computer class. My advisor (Dr. Upp) and the department chairman even created some courses on computer operations, computer security, and operating system internals. Today, VM still exists in various forms. IBM mainframes run zVM (as well as many other z/operating systems), while others use older IBM mainframes (4331, 3033-MP, z/system 16, etc.). I prefer using Hercules (4.7) to run VM/CE 1.2 (Community Edition). Your Windows 10 and 11 systems can support hundreds of people connected to and sharing the Dell T7920 workstation.

Connor, you will know when you've achieved Mainframe Guru status when you refer to Mainframes as "Big Iron". That's what we called it when PC's came around. Working on the "Big Iron".

OMG - I am retired but I was the overall top mainframe tech at a fortune 500 company 20 years ago. I do not consider a person that supports a software product like Endevor, OPS/MVS, CA-View or a scheduling package a "Systems Programmer". Nor do I consider someone that add dasd, backups/ restore dasd, or administer security packages, or is a admin on a Database. A system programmer. In my opinion a systems programmer installs and upgrades the operating system and possibly software packages like DB2, CICS etc. A system programmer also deals with DUMPS. Can read DUMPS. Can read and write in assembler language and C language. Rexx is a very good language and I coded in it a lot when I worked, but honestly I considered it a programming language for IDIOTS. If you are not capable of writing a moderately difficult Assembler or Mainframe C program and don't understand the internals of the operating system including Control Blocks you have no business calling yourself a "Systems Programmer". I do have one question since I retired their is something called z/TPF. Is this the evolution of the old TPF that runs the airlines code where you have very little I/O so its super fast?

Where can I find a community for mainframe as a newbie in the field? I wanna be able to get a job soon and meet other mainframe learners and share knowledge/study together

ive just opened cobol no idea where it will go or how long it will take me to learn it. There has to be a demand for it

I have been there before! Welcome to the x86 world.

I just started working on the mainframe in 2024 and the mentorship is excellent. Soon moving on to the cloud

Hello, I am using OPC and this happens: I have an applicationOne that has the jobA,jobB,JobC. I need to read the content of the application and only put the names of the jobs in a vector to use them in another application. Do you know where I can get information to schedule these tasks? Thanks a lot

But every big bank/insurance company/Kohls/Fedex/Walmart are on mainframe and none of them are off of it. Two have tried (Fedex and Kohls) and failed absolutely miserably. Lots of seasoned veterans with decades of experience are retiring and there's not enough people to replace them. I can speak from experience. So if companies are running in "keep the lights on" mode... how the hell are they ever going to get off? There's opportunity right there for young people. And in addition to that here's a fun fact: stick a mainframer on any other system and he/she can instantly be productive. This does not work the other way around ;)

i have been learning a bit of cobol since im unemployed and wanted to do something for fun as the time pass by, since then i learn not just cobol but JCL, REXX, what is TSO and ISPF and... a bit of cobol

Sure thing. Why not?

Is it possible to work remotely and not from the specific workplace? Suppose I am from abroad and work with a company from another country

Mainframe may have the best tech for some applications but the best people have left IBM. IBM has been mismanaging the product for a long time. Companies are considering vendor risk and not many might stay with a drowning vendor who happens to be a monopoly. New startups are competing with banking industry and they aren’t building them with mainframe. So the job is not bullet proof as many think.

Starting as a Junior Mainframe engineer in my career, and I'm super pumped.

how do i get into the industry as an EE in Canada ?

In 1999 I was one of the authors of the IBM Redbook CICS/Java. I think today the mainframe should offer more than just JCL and Cobol

I started programming in 1974 on a Wang micro-computer as a college freshman. I was able to move to an IBM 370/158 as a college junior and senior. My computer studies were in BAL, computer security, VM/370 operating systems internal, and how to be an IBM VM systems programmer. VM was a great choice, as it allowed me to work for 40+ years. I'm now retired and can still run VM at home using Hercules.

​I'm a CICS system programmer. Even though some MF jobs have gone offshore, I don't think all of them will - especially syprogs....although alot of Application Programmer jobs have. One reason is government jobs (Fed and State) have to stay in the States because of security - and the government runs lots of mainframes. Some companies do prefer US workers for various reasons. And for other reason, I think there will be US based MF sysprog jobs for at least the next 20 years if not more. The MF workforce is VERY old. I know about a hundred sysprogs and exactly one under 45. I get offers of $70/hour...but I have been doing this for over 30 years. My boss has 3 openings (none in CICS) that he can't fill, and one pays 160K. One of his guys retired but was persuaded to stay by working less days a week. A newbie isn't going to make close to 160K to start but will do ok but will do very well in 10 years if they are smart and a hard worker. Big downside is oncall....once every 4 weeks, and you need to be available 24/7 for that week. Hours can be longer than 8 per day, especially if you get sucked into a crisis call for 5 hours right before you are about to leave. Don't forget the weekend work on Sunday at 2 AM because that is when the IPLs happen and no, you don't get overtime - but a good boss will give you comp time and allow you to slip out for an appointment or whatever and work less than 8 hours every so often as compensation. You gotta be a team player to do well, make sacrifices for the team, and help people when you can. Your coworkers become kinda like family...I don't have loyalty (or respect) for the megacorp, but I do for my team. But to get back to my main point...a smart, hardworking, team player can do very well as a MF System Programmer. They've been writing off and trying to kill off the MF for years, but it just runs at too many places and is too ingrained to die!

Besides IMS and DB2, I've seen alot of VSAM. Also he missed the CICS team...I think CICS runs at almost every shop I've been at. CICS sysprogs rule! Besides REXX, learn JCL early in your career. Fun video to watch...keep them coming.

Job security? I worked for National Bank in 2008. After 4 months, the bank was sold out to PNC, I was laid off. Got new job at Fifth Third, split off to new corporation, Vantiv. Job outsourced to TATA. Next job I had, I was outsourced to Accenture. My specialty was in zOS Assembler, I coded Assembler all my life (Yes, I knew COBOL also). But, it would appear that to corporations, I cost too much money. I know of coworkers who lost their jobs due to outsourcing. So, would I recommend Mainframe coding? Nah.. If you want job security, become a plumber or electrician.

The problem with the Mainframe is IBM, it doesn't facilitate access to technology, it doesn't make the costs of owning a mainframe itself cheaper in companies, if you want to learn, you need to use an emulator like Hercules with an extremely outdated operating system or TK4 with a system from the year 1960~70. There's no way to compete with infrastructure and completely open systems, with software that you download and learn yourself, and amazingly IBM is one of the biggest sponsors of Linux, they bought RedHat, and so on. It's a shame zOS and Mainframe are incredible and very stable but with an owner like IBM the future of the mainframe will be just another Cloud server.

Ispf and TS0 rexx are great. Worked with Netview started automation of VTAM then automated everything starting from IPL.

Stored procedures are only great to get the data. When you start processing that data in a stored procedure it really is slow compared to doing that on middle ware. You can parallelize the iteration through data sets easily using threads on middleware. You can offload the backend SQL so the transactional work progresses quickly. Als stored procedures are a hell to properly test and debug and versions compared to just Java code or even better C/C++. You can properly test the code with mocks in the middleware, you need a database instance with representative data to test stored procedures. I’ve moved a lot of business logic out of stored procedures into middleware and batch applications easily quadrupling speed. So stored procedures to get a collection is perfect and like you said safer. Doing business logic in stored procedures is not such a great idea in my experience.

When I worked for IBM in 2001 to 2003 customers were already hard at work to move away from mainframe. Now 20 years later I worked for some of those companies as a freelancer and they are still “moving away”. Now with a higher degree of emergency because the COBOL devs who wrote some of the business criticism code are starting to perish. I’m so happy that when IBM offered me to more to z/OS that I said I’m first and foremost a C/C++ developer and I will stay on the platform for which C was build Unix and that’s real Unix not that bastardized French BULL Unix you sell as AIX. 😂 And I now hardly ever do sysadmin stuff. You need to keep evolving, I’m now more into CI/CD infrastructure as code, after 13 years of identity management development. It’s good you show that we in IT need to diversify too. You need to go where the most demand is. It’s also nice to learn and see new things.

Good stuff. Did systems programming for a few years in the early and mid 80s. Then moved to a development career. I remember when SMP4 was free and then IBM released SMP/E and started charging customers to fix broken IBM code. LOL. One suggestion - As a sysprog, start writing (or study existing) system and JES exits. Anything to learn assembler. Learn about the hardware. (Ficon, channels, processors, lpars, etc). Learn the ins and outs of the binder (formerly the link editor). Learn TCP/IP (no real need for SNA anymore - LOL). Learn RACF.

Web programmers are a DIME a dozen. Same goes for Java, Sprinboot, Ruby, Python, C#, Docker, K8, etc., lots of competition. Legacy tech is total opposite. If you're good with C, Cobol, RPG, etc., you can name your own price.

DOes anyone know how much COBOL programmers earn at large banks or insurance companies?

Depends on the size of your shop, and the historical assignment of responsibilities between teams. And, of course, who retired and who had to pick their responsibilities.

A mainframe is institutionalized logic. Started with Cobol at the University mainframe in the 1970s. Gave the foundation to later manage large corporate projects worldwide. To start working with a mainframe is a strong foundation for persistent success and reputation in IT. Done right, young man.

Great vid. very!! intersting view into mainframes. thanks !

This is the point of view of a silo shop. As a mainframe sysprog, I work on Z/OS, Z/VM, and linux. It does not matter if I am tracing IP/VTAM, installing a new linux server, adding new DASD vols, or creating new LPARS, CICS, or application problems.

It's good to hear that many are from mainframe, i am about to compelete my 3 yrs in mainframe tech soon , hope will got to connect with you guys in near future 😊

The approach to documentation, development, and maintenance you are adopting when working on a mainframe would never work in the "real world",. You are basically proposing to go back to a Waterfall type of workflow. I think time taught us that this way of working is highly inefficient and basically against innovation, quick iterations and quick feedback are in my opinion the way to go. Anyway thanks for the suggestion but I think will stick to my boring full-stack job that let me learn something new every day.

I worked in bank mainframe operations for a decade in the 80s and early 90s. Working for years in the non-IT world, it is abundantly clear when corporations have horrible change control. The data centers I worked in would never alow the kind of poorly tested and verified changes to critical software that I've seen.

I worked as mainframe developer for 2 year's pls pls don't join mainframe technology

Interesting view. Truth of it, there are so few zOS engineers that you often wear multiple hats./ I do DevOps (newest), BMC Software, and customer communications. We're still looking for a DB2 sysprog; but its a federal position. not to everyone's liking