It must be fun being a hardware engineer for IBM mainframes: Cost constraints for your designs can be mostly be left aside, as there's no competition, and your still existing customers have been domesticated to pay you top dollar every upgrade cycle, and frankly, they don't care.

Cycle times are long enough so you can thoroughly refine your design.

Marketing pressures are probably extremely well thought, as anyone working on Mainframe marketing is probably either an ex-engineer or almost an engineer by osmosis.

And the product is different enough from anything else, that you can try novel ideas, but not different enough that your design skills are useless elsewhere, and you can't leverage other's advancement idea.