Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

I want to move in to the infrastructure side roles. Do we have only DB2 admin . CICS admin kind of roles in mainframes for this when we look for infrastructure of mainframes? I searched on it but the results are confusing like only admin type roles are there.

Part of the problem may be terminology. People supporting mainframes are usually called system programmers and there are far more types of system programmers than just DB2 or CICS.

Thanks. If they are system programmers who are admins? Sorry but it looks like that these terms are used for each other.

in the IBM world

system/systems programmer is the term/role that has been in use from the beginning
for people dealing with the installation,customisation,maintenance ( problem determination/resolution) of systems software
( system side )

later on
the administrator term/role came up oriented towards the user/application side of things
for technical, organisational, and - sometimes - legal reasons
( user / application side )

Well you need to decide which way you want your career to go -- if you want to install / support mainframe software, you need to start looking at system programming positions. If you want to install / support applications or Linux/Unix systems, you need to start looking at admin positions. There is rarely overlap between them.

I'll let you know what I know about Indian job market, I could be missing some roles but here are some of them.. The system programmer role is split into these major roles

Network Systems support
MVS/zOS Support
Performance & Capacity Engineering
Storage Management
Application DBA
Systems DBA

+ CICS systems programmer