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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

Mainframe skills shortage is a complete fabrication, it simply doesn’t exist. In June of this year a local company laid off 850 people, a company with a large mainframe installation (SS&C formerly DST Systems). Hundreds were mainframe programmers. This is after a decade offshoring. There are thousands of former mainframers here. And this is just in Kansas City, Mo.

Anecdotal but representative I believe. Mainframes are costs centers, always will be. And the target of cost cutting. Millenials aren’t dumb!

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Your comment made me curious and I ended up finding a great article on the story behind the layoffs at SS&C.

https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature-story/article/210195...

Great read, long form writing we don't see enough of nowadays, and not pay walled!

Holy, that was a heartbreaking story of its own kind.

"Being a publicly traded company — as DST has been since 1995 — does not lend itself well to the kind of community-oriented approach DST took under McDonnell, though. When you are a public company, your duty is to your shareholders, and most of those shareholders 1.) do not live in the community in which your business is based and 2.) wish to see consistent, ever-rising profits. Handing out subsidies to the coffee shop next door, or buying up distressed assets and selling them at cost are, in the eyes of sociopathic capitalists, unnecessary acts of philanthropy. It’s the type of thing that can draw the attention of corporate raiders and activist hedge funds, entities that buy up stock in a company and then use their power to demand the short-term maximization of profits. "

That was worth reading. capitalism's fixation on quarterly reports is ruining successful companies like DST.

Do the terms asset stripping or corporate raider mean anything anymore?

In the 70's and 80's lots of todays big names made a fortune buying controlling shares of companies that had spent decades reducing their overheads buy buying (instead of leasing) their corp offices, factory machines, etc until the value of the real assets were greater than the stock value. Then all the assets were sold off, and leased back, with shorterm sweetheart deals that lasted just long enough for the raider to sell the resulting company to someone else (or simply in some cases shut it down).

Wall street has long sense stopped serving anyone but themselves. Its long past due for many of their activities to be made illegal.

Tech service companies have to rely on reputation for renewals and referrals. Focusing on quarterly profits makes managers take short-cuts that burn bridges. It might work in a commodity business where the outputs are standardized or easy to grade, but short-cutting reputations is shooting your own foot.

That's not capitalism, it's our culture around capitalism. There is nothing inherent to capitalism that stresses short term growth vs. long term growth. For example much of the push for short term growth comes from the stock market, but the stock market (or public ownership at all) is in no way required for capitalism to work (and IMO it would probably be better without it).

> There is nothing inherent to capitalism that stresses short term growth vs. long term growth

It rewards people that focus on short term growth and punishes people that think long term, that sounds pretty inherent to me.

Just like the human self interest that allows capitalism to thrive short term thinking is another human quirk it exploits.

Sorry, but that is entirely captialism. You don't get to take core aspects of the system and say it's not really part of the system.

False. Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

It's the government's requirements for filing 10-Ks and 10-Qs that generate this type of behavior. Plenty of examples out there where capital-raising efforts, and therefore investment decisions are stymied by markets that are driven by quarterly government reporting.

Some companies have been able to fight it off and really put long-term profitability into place (Apple seems like a reasonable example of this), but it is the exception, not the rule, and many times does not last long.

DST!? I still deal with DST(haven't heard SS&C mentioned) in the medical insurance industry every day. Nothing but bad things to say about them.

How would characterize their software and services? Cutting edge modern stuff with engaged knowledgeable support?

I'm not sure if your argument supports your conclusion:

1) You mentioned layoffs, but you didn't mention how long it took those people to find new jobs.

2) For those who couldn't find new jobs, how many of them avoided interviews or job offers because they were unwilling to relocate?

3) How transferable are "mainframe" skills to other "mainframe" installations? (As a non-mainframe-programmer, I have no idea how much one's skillset is peculiar to a specific mainframe vendor, mainframe OS version, etc.)

4) I get the impression that long-term mainframe developers actually have two parallel skillsets: (a) technical skills related to mainframe work in general, and (b) skills related to their particular installation's line-of-business and specific applications. For laid-off employees who couldn't find work, is it possible that their (b)-style skillsets were just not marketable to many other employers?

FWIW, a couple of years back I had a gentleman who was a 30 year mainframe programmer in a Rails & Postgres class that I taught. He learned both, was humble enough to take an internship for a Rails job at over 50 and then turned it into full employment.

Anecdotal, but I found it interesting to watch the portability of experience.

IMHO the key is your student has programming skills mixed with humility. When I'm hiring, that's all I'm really looking for, and I think that's true for most coding jobs, mainframe or not.

Honestly, COBOL is not that different from any other imperative programming language. A bit more verbose perhaps, but if you are a good COBOL programmer you could pick up another language without much trouble.

This answer is pretty telling... Thirty years of mainframe experience and at the end of it, all you're qualified for is an internship.

Honestly, I assumed there was going to be more of an age bias working against him than anything else. He picked things up very quickly.

The conclusion that there are many former mainframe developers who no longer work as mainframe developers in the US might be anecdotal but fits what I've seen in the Chicago market as well.

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