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Comment by cess11 | Hacker News Reader

From afar it seems easier than ever to learn mainframe. IBM has free courses on z/OS these days (besides the registration) and there are lots of PDF:s hidden away in blog posts and whatnot on their site. Coursera has some courses too.

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For being a user of the mainframe that may be true. For being a systems programmer for the mainframe not true.

When I looked into it they offered education in JCL and networking and stuff.

Reading about z/OS systems programming is one thing. Being able to practice with it on a real system is what would likely be missing. You have to have a safe environment to learn on and it's hard to get access to those.

Why don't you expect "hands-on experience on real mainframe" to be the second sentence when IBM promotes their courses?

Notice I said as a systems programmer. A systems programmer is the one who would configure system settings (possibly for the whole lpar). Is IBM letting people change settings on the LPAR as part of the course?

Why are you moving the goal posts?

Go look for yourself.

Somebody has to kepp the lights on for stuff that is still out there running on cobol when the current generation retires. Its already a bit of problem with tryung to port it over, as nobody can read it

All over the world new COBOL developers are made every day. Typically they aren't specifically COBOL developers, they also have background in Java, C# or C++. It's common in institutions that rely on COBOL to have toolchains that generate code for both mainframe and regular applications or SDK:s. In many places it's no longer locked in with greybearded warlocks.

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