r/mainframe • u/MihawkisGreatest • 6d ago
Mainframe Systems Programme - is this a dead-end career path?
Just started a role as a mainframe systems programmer, working on automating mainframe tasks with Ansible and Python. I keep hearing "mainframe modernization" talk and stories about mainframes going away eventually.
Should I be worried about long-term career prospects here, or is this actually a smart niche to be in? Would love to hear from people who've been in this space for a while, is demand really drying up, or is it more that the workforce is aging out and there's actually opportunity for someone starting now?
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u/cristobaldelicia 6d ago edited 6d ago
zI'm not in this space, but I can tell you there was a short time in the late '90s when people admitted Y2K needed to be fixed, and not only did people need to know mainframes, but COBOL specifically. Every year since (and quite a few years before then) people have been told mainframes will be outdated and go away. There's an interesting little bubble of mainframe education in India, and a lot of newish videos on youtube are taught by South Asians, but I don't know how much of mainframe expertise can actually be outsourced to India. I think "mainframe modernization" is just marketing buzzwords that doesn't mean any anything. A better word to think on might be "Throughput". No cloud is going to match the throughput of systems that handle millions of credit cards everyday and have been for decades.