Mainframe as a career.

[Robert Sample]

Why do they even think of removing a mainframe computer?

There is a management perception that mainframes are "expensive". I think this partly comes because mainframe software is expensive (it is not unusual for mainframe software vendors to sell their programs for well over US $100,000) and hardware upgrades can be even more expensive (a small mainframe will run half a million US dollars and they can go upwards of 10 million). Managers don't always see that their company is spending that much or more on their servers, server system software, and applications.

[Puja Motwani]

Why do they even think of removing a mainframe computer?

There is a management perception that mainframes are "expensive". I think this partly comes because mainframe software is expensive (it is not unusual for mainframe software vendors to sell their programs for well over US $100,000) and hardware upgrades can be even more expensive (a small mainframe will run half a million US dollars and they can go upwards of 10 million). Managers don't always see that their company is spending that much or more on their servers, server system software, and applications.

So that means, mainframes are actually expensive?

[Robert Sample]

So that means, mainframes are actually expensive?

Yes and no. The dollar cost can be high, but you need to consider that there can be 10,000 or more people using the machine simultaneously. So the per-user cost for a mainframe actually tends to be less than (or equivalent to) the per-user cost of workstations and servers. At a previous employer, their annual replacement costs for servers was about 1.5 million dollars.

[Sharad Nikam]

In India Mainframe is not a good career choice, it might be outside but in India, it does not pay you well. In our company, same with experience, same college a person in SAP gets more package than a mainframe programmer.

I also don't understand if positions like CEO, CTO, or CIO can ever be attained by a mainframe programmer?

[Maven JJ]

So that means, mainframes are actually expensive?

Yes and no. The dollar cost can be high, but you need to consider that there can be 10,000 or more people using the machine simultaneously. So the per-user cost for a mainframe actually tends to be less than (or equivalent to) the per-user cost of workstations and servers. At a previous employer, their annual replacement costs for servers was about 1.5 million dollars.

What are the courses one can do to be more successful in the mainframes? As many companies now ask for skills like Kafka, Git and more but my current project does not have it, while any online video does not talk about it in connection with mainframes. There are example of working with them in an open source environment, how does than one learn them to get better jobs?

[Maven JJ]

If your rational is that every UI/UX developers or any other open source technology developer is/are getting paid more, it's not straight forward correct, if someone is getting paid they have done their labor. For instance, just look for the salaries of just Java developers, they are not that good unless they have other skill-set of current market. Today, if you have knowledge of Devops, Cloud computing and mainframe altogether -- you are an asset and can get a very competitive pay, fwiw.

But in our company we don't have such tools in use. Even when we try to look for doing something ourself, it's way too time consuming that you don't finish office work.

is there anyway we can learn such things ourselves?

[Sankar Sabari]

Mainframe has not been very fruitful career choice. We get very less paid compared to many other technologies like Cloud Computing, Data Science.

With 10 years experience in India it is very tough to get jobs in mainframes.

[Robert Sample]

In a previous company, one of the CICS support programmers became the CIO eventually. So it does happen.

[Raja Babu]

He must be a lucky person. In 2023, even though the number of SMEs in US and other countries getting retired, the salaries and scope for senior people in other countries is not that good. While other technologies give you a good package easily.

[Neeraj Gugnani]

Mainframe is a very slow career in India. At least I have that experience. Many I know working in start-ups and cloud-computing gets much better package than us in Mainframes. Though some of the recent blogs and news says mainframes are coming back and will be good career.

[Prakash Jha]

In between, starting from last October till Dec-Jan, there were good job, but seems like now again the market is down for job opening in mainframes.