Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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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