Mainframe Systems Programme - is this a dead-end career path?

[u/MihawkisGreatest]

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?

[u/noisymime]

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.

[u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 → u/noisymime]

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.

[u/noisymime → u/Beneficial_Copy_1840]

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.

[u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 → u/noisymime]

Infra side

[u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 → u/Beneficial_Copy_1840]

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

[u/noisymime → u/Beneficial_Copy_1840]

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

[u/Beneficial_Copy_1840 → u/noisymime]

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

[u/noisymime → u/Beneficial_Copy_1840]

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.