Mainframes in Internet News
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Imagine a 24 year old excited about mainframes. Internet News captured a story which mainframers hope becomes more pervasive over time. It seems there is intelligence in undergrads and they are looking at the needs of the marketplace, and trying to differentiate themselves when selecting a career path.
IBM, BMC and CA are all making investments in mainframe education at the college level. Maybe the tide will start to turn, and the fear of insufficient backfilling of mainframe talent by the world's largest companies will become a distant memory.
What other ways can the mainframe community provide assistance in recruiting mainframe talent? What about technical schools. It seems to me that a programmer can do without art apprecitation, advanced physics et. al.
I remember years ago, IBM retrained a lot of administrative folks as programmers when they decided to get into the software business. Maybe it is time to look at the old logic / aptitude test they used to determine the ability to be successful as a programmer. What do you think? Are we aiming to high? Should we be recruiting at a high school level and offering students a college and technical school path to the mainframe?
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It amazes me when I sit in on meeting and hear some of our developers talking about this "cool, new" feature that "is the best thing since sliced bread" that they read about in some magazine. Things such as Virtual Machines (aka VMWare) and the such. It is all I can do to hold back from rolling my eyes and going into my mainframe spiel. Virtual environments have been around for years on the mainframes, and just because they are finally making it to the PC arena doesn't make it new.
There is an IBM commercial out there that shows a guy turning his back and the servers growing and growing behind him. That is exactly how I feel in our current environment. I see every project that comes along needing a new server, at about $10,000 a pop. The sad part about is these servers are busy about 5% of the day, and sitting 95% idle.
I have tried to tell anyone that will listen about how our problems and server-creep could be solved by using a mainframe. Centralize our systems, especially our database. Reduce and consolidate and sit back and watch the savings just roll in. The problem is -- the moment you mention the word mainframe people let out a sigh and act like you are talking about 1964.
I'm only 31, but I started my career in mainframes and have been a fan ever since. I believe that mainframes not only have a place in today's technology, but in many cases they are the better solution to many of the situations in many data centers. We have to break out of this "mainframe is old technology" mentality if we ever want to use these guys for the power and technology they hold.
Any ideas on how to do this... I'm all ears.
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