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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

That's not true: there is a push here. There's been previous articles, college partnerships, and so on. I'm not going to pretend they'll put more effort here than on cheap labor. However, there's been colleges teaching COBOL, mainframe, etc, even community colleges, with almost nobody trying to get into those jobs outside people already working one. This is one of few times where there might be a real labor shortage as one generation retires or dies off without another to take the reins.

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I talked to a professor at a community college teaching mainframe skills a couple years ago.

I asked him point blank at one point, what the average starting salary for a graduate from his school hired to do mainframe work was. The number he threw out was less than 1/2 of the starting salary of the average comp-sci graduate from the state school down the road. Granted the people from the CC had a two year degree, and were being hired for pretty low level positions. But unless the pay ramp was really steep anyone doing it was crazy not to just enroll in the comp-sci department at the state school and put in the additional two years.

I considered if becoming a mainframe expert was a good career move, and from what I can tell midlevel mainframe guys don't make as much as midlevel PHP experts. The top end is ok, but i've heard of people doing vmware designs/installs for more money. Maybe some mainframe guys are paid by the gold bar, but I sure didn't meet any.

That is probably why there is a "shortage". People my age look at it and decide its not a good move because while companies will pay 8 figures for a machine they won't pay a fraction of it to the guys running said machine.

Appreciate your perspective on that. Curious, what was the cost of living in that area? Mine is one of the lower in the country: $50-70k/yr/household is decent living. People here often see what people get paid in Bay area, New York, Chicago, etc and think we're hugely ripped off. Then, they look at housing, etc to see a bit different picture.

So, I wonder if it's that industry segment in general getting ripped off or just your area.

The area in question was a large midwestern city, so its not exactly tops, but the pay rates for computer people in that area are almost always >$100k for anyone with experience.

I don't have a breakdown of payrates for the CC in question, but I'm guessing many of the students going into plumbing/electrician/AC repair/etc were making as much or more than the students going into the mainframe positions.

Ouch...

I think there's a distinction to made in this discussion between mainframe application programmers (ie cobol, anyone taking intro courses at an IBM sponsored school) and system programmers ie the guys setting up and writing site integration stuff ie the guys these books are ttargeted toward. Similar to php vs people writing drivers in your example.

Unfortunately this distinction is rarely delinated in these threads.

I didn't make that distinction. Good that you brought it up. Any more information on that distinction in form of articles or salary surveys?

I agree with you. I've spent few years being a mainframe monkey (support). I got out when I had the opportunity. I have seen how people in other countries are taking on this role (of being mainframe monkeys) like there's nothing else in the world. This is mainly because they are cheap labor. While at the same time, the people in the States doing the same, are on the edge of their seats with minimum wage (ask MF operators).

The high-end MF programmers are far and few. Most of them, are there in a unique position within any company (there are hardly two of the same kind within the same company). They are mostly pricks and aholes in themselves (because of their position, their ego makes them as such). But that's a side topic.

Irrespective of what we see with the collaboration in educational field, the MF jobs are just not economically appealing enough for US graduates. Indians, Brazilians and Chinese, on the other hand, have that opportunity because American companies are getting them cheap comparatively.

I think the distinction here between low and high-end MF operators may not be just that they're MF operators at certain experience level. At a number of companies, I've seen that the people on top have a thorough understanding of the applications the mainframe supports and are critical for making changes that don't break it. Not having them any more could make stuff stop working. So, it justifies their higher pay plus job security.

You think that might be the case for the high-end MF operators in general?

The good operators stay long, but they are still on the edge. And there's nobody whose going to tell you how valuable those good operators are for any company's day to day operations. But again, they are not equally valued. What ultimately matters: can the Indians do the job? The answer is yes. And that's where there is cost saving.

I guess the job security is down to what my old pal told me. He was an embedded engineer partly because it was interesting and partly for job security. I asked what he meant about job security. He said his work needed people to physical be there, get the job done, and support it over time with quick, physical response if needed. Harder to offshore than code and only so many H1-B's they can do. So, he predicted we'd have a lot more to worry about.

He seems right so far. Most of the embedded industry overseas is production or low-level stuff easy to hand off. There's usually someone like him over here involved in one or more parts of the process. Maybe I should've picked that market.

There are American companies out there who do not have to worry about H1-Bs because their whole business is being run from other countries. They just shift the workload altogether, with mid managers etc, leaving only the highest of the hierarchy in the US. As a low level tech, I have been through several offshoring where I have seen the whole local departments disappear, only to reemerge in another country with new sets of people. I managed to survive for some time because they could not offshore due to some government regulations. The truth is, American companies will offshore as much as they can. They have and they will. It is a simple case of increased profits due to cost-saving.

Makes sense.

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