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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

In 20 years you will be the only mainframe programmer left... I've seen many examples of this: people who refuse to learn the next big thing and end up with skills that are dead.

You need to constantly challenge yourself. If you don't want to advance either you need to change your attitude and jump into something that seems hard, or you need to find a new path that you will enjoy.

I don't want to go into management, so I'm trying to figure out how I can be the technical person in the company that is paid more than the CEO. I'll probably never get there, but it is a challenge that keeps me looking to see how I can be better.

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I work with a AS400 contractor, it is all he knows. This thing was released in 1986. He has a great work/life balance and contracts with multiple medium/large companies.

SO being the only mainframe programmer left can actually be in your favor, it often turns into short and high income tasks. Many companies are running systems which are 40 years old, large banks, costco, medium businesses and the list goes on. The cost of updating this stuff is insanely expensive and if it ain't broken why fix it.

While this is true, I think it's also fair to say that it's not easy to just become a contractor. It requires just as much growth as climbing the ladder.

Learning how to manage your time, network, insurance, etc. In addition, you're competing for an ever shrinking pool of work which naturally limits the amount of work available and thus competitive participants.

Also, I've worked with customers that have a ton of this "not broke software". The reality is that these systems present major bottlenecks in providing modern experiences around the data they manage. People spend a lot of time working around the limitations of these systems under the guise that its too expensive to replace.

Maybe. I know mainframe programmers out of work because they couldn't adapt. I know programmers who made a lifetime of supporting obsolete products after everyone else forgot about them.

There is a difference in attitude even though from the outside they look the same, the prospects are very different.

Sometimes people like this will get caught in a trap where they can't find other employment elsewhere without starting over. So their wages and skill stagnate (a lot of our upskilling comes from working on teams that force us to grow). So they've stayed at the same company since 1995 and their nice $50k salary has grown to maybe $85k, which, while not shabby in absolute terms, is on par with fresh graduates in most of the USA.

Old tech is a double-edged sword. Like any other obscure tech, there's less competition, but for fewer overall jobs.

The global financial system largely runs on a tech stack of Cobol, CICS, DB2 on zOS.

Many days I consider in a positive light “retiring” into a mid-level SWE role, content to just grind tickets of varying complexity and pay little attention to the cacophony around me. That wouldn’t be a bad life (assuming I had at least “damn you” money banked [doesn’t need to be F-you money])

Get me a red stapler, please.

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