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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

I find it somewhat ironic that IBM is struggling so hard to find COBOL programmers to keep mainframe alive, but they also insist on locking down z/os to the point that you can't get access to a terminal unless you already know COBOL and work for an enterprise spending millions with IBM.

You want nerds to flock to your platform, you have to give them access...

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There's no problem finding "cobol programmers"; "cobol programming ability" isn't their bottleneck. Finding someone competent to do professional software archaeology & borderline forensics for 40K/y is their bottleneck.

“Shortage of programmers” almost always means “we don’t want to pay full price for programmers”.

Isn't that the definition of shortage? When we say there is a shortage of X, it means that there is X, but not enough of it to keep the prices at an affordable level, so the prices have risen and some people who need X, want X, and/or previously could afford X no longer can. This is true as long as there is a shortage, not an absolute lack of something.

I mean, famines happened because sometimes there would be a shortage of food, perhaps due to drought, or a sudden increase in population not matched by an increase in food production. Prices would go through the roof. Rich people could afford the new prices and persevered. Poor people died of hunger. But if the poor mustered enough gold, they could go buy food like rich people did.

So my question is, do you consider famines shortages? If not, what even is a shortage? In yes, how is labour shortage any different, except in scale?

The mere fact of something being expensive doesn't mean that there is a shortage of it. A shortage is when there is less of a given thing than there is demand for it. Typically, demand goes down when price goes up and there is no longer a shortage, so a lack of essential goods like water would be considered a shortage because demand cannot retreat in the way that demand for programmers can retreat.

Note that your example of a famine brings up 'shortage' before any mention of prices. There are multiple ideas of shortage at play. At the most basic level shortage can mean that there is not enough of a good/service for everyone to have it at any price (food in a famine, medicine in a pandemic). Typically we apply shortage to situations where the supply and demand curves reach some hard stop at the edges (elasticity goes to 0). In the case of normal market dynamics where supply and demand are both reasonably elastic then there really are no shortages per say - just cheapskates.

Finally! A comedian!

Perfectly setting up the classical joke that banks are too poor to find COBOL programmers because there is a "shortage" ;) ;)

You, sir, are a true connoisseur and made my day! Thank you!

> keep the prices at an affordable level

They're a bank. They can afford it.

I can't believe this (still?) isn't being more widely publicized by IBM - they offer free 1-year z/OS accounts to anyone. You're perfectly free to re-apply the following year (I've done it myself).

https://www-01.ibm.com/events/wwe/ast/mtm/audit.nsf/enrollal...

> I find it somewhat ironic that IBM is struggling so hard to find cheap COBOL programmers to keep mainframe alive

Fixed that for you. There are lots and lots of former Cobol developers that have been laid off over the past 20 years due to offshoring. There is no shortage.

There is the z/PDT, which is an emulator that runs on your PC. It comes with a software pack that includes z/OS, z/VM, and few other things. It runs $900 a year, not sure if there is an initial cost.

http://dtsc.dfw.ibm.com/adcd/adcd.shtml

However 900 a year is still out of reach for most individuals. They should make it free.

Has anyone done this? Is it $900 for everything one needs or are there additional costs?

I think the $900 is just for the z software. For zPDT you need to provide your own hardware/cloud instance, and pay for the emulation software on top of that. That came in around $2.5k/year IIRC.

It is just the software. You get the software and a USB dongle that acts as the license key for the emulator.

I used this back when I worked at IBM. Most people just ran it on a ThinkPad running Linux. I ran it on a rather beefy tower system, as it was slow on the ThinkPad.

We called the tower system, the baby z, and I took it and physically placed it inside of our System z. One day our CE asked why there was a tower inside of the System z. I told him that it was pregnant.

They weren’t struggling to find COBOL programmers before this. There’s a pool of contractors to maintain COBOL systems. The problem is that there weren’t enough of them available when suddenly a ton of COBOL systems needed changes at once.

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