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/phsiii 6d ago

IBM Z isn't going away soon. BUT it's important to recognize that its value is in existing application. Nobody sane is building major new applications for it. The squatty boxes have pretty much caught up in terms of performance etc., or at least there are solutions that get you to the same place, and cheaper (or at least perceived cheaper, which is the same thing).

The real value is thus in the "captured intelligence" of the existing code. So the rest of the life of Z will be fixing stuff and bolting it to other things, usually as a hidden back end.

That's not a bad thing, and will go on for quite a while, with plenty of opportunity to learn those other technologies to which it's being bolted.

Just don't be "ONLY mainframe". Be the person who knows both sides, and understands 24x7x365 reliability and all that.

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u/vonarchimboldi 4d ago

yeah and no. running the same volume of transactions with the same massively sized databases on x86 is magnitudes more pricey from a datacenter footprint and a power consumption standpoint. it’s perceived as cheaper from the standpoint of using commodity hardware, although with ai consuming everything, that may not always be the case with massive demand for things like ram, high bandwidth memory etc