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I asked the same question, so that I could apply..

Sorry for the delay. Mostly midrange (AS/400) consulting at manufacturing plants, then full time jobs at a heavy machine dealership, and a bank. Changed to PC development after about 15 years of that, then management, and it hasn't been the same after that, ha ha.

I think the technical freedom plays a big part, not because you're chasing the shiniest, but because you're choosing the tools that will hopefully outlast you. One of my former employers was 'modernizing' their IBM i (former AS/400) systems by porting them to Java and Windows Servers, and they were having all kinds of problems. Couldn't even get the EBCDIC to Unicode conversion quite right. I was lucky not to be there anymore.

I smile whenever I see EBCDIC, probably because I never had to deal with it.

But I'm sorta old and some of my school's texts were outdated so they had programming examples and explanatory text that treated EBCDIC on equal footing with ASCII.

So unlike anybody who dealt with EBCDIC conversions in the wild, seeing that acronym actually takes me back to happier days!

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