Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

My partner makes a living writing z/OS assembly language, has been for many years now. The platform is still going strong as a business. The main problem they face is all the folks who know how to program these things are retiring (or dropping dead at their keypunches.) It's very hard to convince new people to learn how to operate these systems.

For your partner's sake I hope you're right but is z/OS as a platform actually continuing to grow, or are they just having a hard time filling seats because it's hard to see a long and profitable future working on (what some might call) "legacy" systems?

When I was growing up (decades ago, mind), my dad kept trying to convince me to get into machining. Lathes, mills, tool and die making, etc. In his line of work, he saw lots of machining companies basically paying all education and training expenses for new hires because their experienced old timers were retiring faster than they could be replaced. (He also thought computers were a fad...) I'm sure it was a good opportunity at the time. But nearly all of those companies eventually closed up because offshore manual labor was and still is way cheaper. If I'd had taken his advice, I'm pretty sure I would have had to reboot into another career at least once by this point.

Interesting.

What sort of applications does your partner work on?

He does system level stuff, enhancements to IBM's z/OS. A lot of their customers are big financial institutions, banks and the like that use MVS for transaction processing. His software augments the operating system and isn't application specific.