hi,

i am just curious... i found this vacancy in a certain company and they need a mainframe programmer. well, after some conversation, i found out that the task of this kind of programmer is NOT the development of applications, but primarily cutomization of mainframes to fit the needs of the company.

do you guys know of anthing about this job? what kind of customizations do they do? programming right, so what kind of language?

???

I hear a lot of stuff on mainframes is maintaining legacy code, or tweaking it for now. Some companies have huge amount of code, and it's just too expensive to port it to something new. So they have programmers that maintain the code base.

Mainframe programmers usually deal with acronym beasts like Cobol, JCL, TSO, IMS, CICS, DB2 ...

If, like me, you have no clue about what's behind them, and do not want to, better look elsewere ...

I've met sometime programmers and system administrators belonging to this world, and, mostly each time, I felt there was an immense gap between how they feel their job and techniques (dumb, boring, rigid) compared to what people in my (and I guess your) side (Open Systems / Protocols, Unix, C, Web, Java, ...) are feeling (passionate, enthusiastic, creative, ...)

That said, I guess at least IBM mainframes can host Linux in virtual machines, so that leave a little hope of fun there too.

Absolutly, I work in a Mainframe environment, and I find it, just as you said, Boring rigid, hideous! I seriously need to update my skills! Everyone that works in the MVS environment hates it. Just something to do for a paycheck.

Jim Cullen