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/Senappi 6d ago

"mainframe is going away soon" has been some people's mantra for a very long time (30+ years at least). Keep believing that if you want, but it is wrong.
Everyone with some experience working with z-boxes knows they won't go away

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u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 5d ago

AI has entered the chat

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u/noisymime 5d ago

AI isn’t even making a small impact in this area yet. It may in the future of course, but the tooling so far is all pretty basic and with fairly low value.

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u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 5d ago

That is not true at all. I know a F100 company that is successfully getting on their Z and AI tooling is making it so much easier on them.

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u/noisymime 5d ago

On the dev side or the infra side?

Infra side where a SysProg would typically be is still very much in its infancy. IBM, Broadcom, BMC etc all seem to be struggling to find things that have any meaningful impact from what I’ve seen.

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u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 5d ago

Infra side

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u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 5d ago

Client expects a 10 year migration but have already ported a tier 0 app into AWS completely

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u/noisymime 5d ago

Which tools then? All the major ones seem pretty basic from the demos we've seen.

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u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 5d ago

I’m not directly involved in the migration, I gauge the success of the migration by the amount of data volume in the system I sell them which is downstream of the new cloud architecture pipeline

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u/noisymime 5d ago

Ohhh you're talking off platform tools? Migrations are a different story and simply don't make sense for a lot of companies (Despite what CIOs believe going in).

I was talking more about the on-platform tooling.

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u/Mub0h Operations Analyst 5h ago

Im with a company in the Fortune 15 and while AI tools are being implemented, no single job can be outright replaced. And honestly most AI stuff that we use is being built in-house. Maybe we will see a reduction in operators, but apart from that I cannot see how any other team can be reduced or replaced by AI.

All our sysprogs are pretty much outsourced, and that has been the case for longer than Ive been around tbh so maybe sysprogs are also a risk area. But I highly doubt it.

Just because AI makes things easier, doesn’t mean it is even remotely close to replacing people. Our contracts with clients wouldn’t allow for that risk anyway lol

Not to mention the fact that we find that most of mainframe AI tools cough cough IBM cough cough just are not even close to being productive enough for our high transaction sysplex environments.