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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm also curious how many total jobs this is.

And also what the pay is. These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs.

To solve the talent deficit, they could say "We pay like FAANG. And if you do serious work, we expect stable jobs and steady career progression for at least 20 more years." Fund it by investing some of the wealth where it needs to be invested.

(The hard part I see is holding companies to career progression, so they don't just bring in people at Google L4/L5 equivalent TC, but plan for those people to become less mobile to other employers due to mainframe skillsets, so easy to retain without normal tech growth in compensation over time.)

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As a former P-series/AIX specialist, I can say that the pay is not as good as a decent linux job, and the career growth potential is very low. Your career options are basically to maintain legacy systems until they can figure out how to migrate it all to linux.

And if you get laid off (happens a lot at IBM lately), your career prospects are to either wait for someone to retire/die or learn linux.

No matter how important they say maintaining the legacy systems is, the pay is low enough to easily convince people to take any other IT career path.

>These jobs are overall more important than the tens of thousands of random software engineers at FAANGs.

the jobs are cost centers at those places while at FAANG it is main R&D, areas of investment, and thus very different treatment by the management, incl. compensation.

One can also wonder how long before LLM would replace the [most of the job of] sysadm of mainframe. I'm pretty sure that the management at those companies would jump at the mere perception of the opportunity to shave a bit of cost like they did with outsourcing.

There are active efforts at IBM to market generative AI to rewrite mainframe code (COBOL->Java). Orgs are desperate for cheap mainframe folks to bridge the gap until they get off of mainframes while most of this skilled workforce is retiring, but the comp and work arrangement quality is likely subpar for a job orgs are actively attempting to eliminate. If you’re close to retirement and have the skills, it’s a fine way to ride into the sunset, but if you’re younger, run away. It’s a trap.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx-code-assistant-4z/1.1?to...

(Have had to sit in meetings on this topic)

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