By Jon Van

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Monday, August 25, 2003

While not as imposing as the Y2K problem of the late 1990s, there is another issue in the making for the computer industry: mainframe brain drain.

Even though mainframe computers are widely used by businesses, few educational institutions teach mainframe skills these days. Young people prefer to learn Windows, Linux or other contemporary systems.

So most mainframe technicians are older people who learned their skills before the dominance of personal computers and workstations. A study by Meta Group found that 55 percent of information technology workers with mainframe experience are older than 50.

The problem is that in the next five years, these mainframe gurus will start retiring, and businesses will have to scramble to cope.

"This will be an especially big problem for the state and federal governments," said Dan Williams, president of Chicago's Interactive Business Systems, an information technology firm.

The retirements could add fuel to the trend among American firms to outsource IT work to foreign countries, Williams said. It also could be a boon for retired computer people who'd like to do some consulting.

"A few years back, when we were working on Y2K we opened a shop in Largo, Fla., because we could find retirees with mainframe experience down there who needed some income," Williams said.

COBOL, a computer language that runs many mainframe applications, is virtually unknown among IT people younger than 30, Williams said, "but people in Russia, Indonesia, India, they know COBOL."

Training younger people in mainframe skills is difficult because few want to learn skills they view as outmoded.

Laurence Bunin, chief of the Handshake Dynamics consulting firm, said that as retirements mount, enterprises will be forced to outsource many functions they do in-house.

"It's kind of like owning an old car: At some point you find yourself spending too much money to keep the thing going, so you decide it's time to get a new car," Bunin said.

[link|http://www.statesman.com/business/content/auto/epaper/editions/monday/business_f3944b8837430024003e.html|link]

They want to send the Unix/Linux to India, fine I'll stay in America and work on mainframes.

And that's what I'm doing right now. Couldn't get a job doing VB and SQL (because my past employer wasn't doing dot NET and I had yet to stock up on MS certifications) so I back to my years of experience and am doing Tandem mainframe programming. So far it appears to be the right decision, since the work environment isn't too stressful and the pay and benefits are good. Also, since we do credit card authorizations and approvals for several hundred banks and financial companies, the job appears stable for now. They wouldn't move the jobs to India until they at least built up the telecommunications infrastructure to handle even part of our daily workload (200-300 transacations/second).