> If these banks and other institutions actually did write fat paychecks to young mainframe programmers the demographic problem they're facing might not be so bad.
When I first started work I was involved in banking/insurance mainframe stuff, and it was honestly a pretty terrible working environment for reasons that spanned from the mundane (like dress codes) to the esoteric (like the horrible crufty legacy codebase). I would have put up with it if it paid well, but it didn't. In fact, it paid significantly worse than the job I'd had before which was installing physical cable plant (fiber optics and copper ethernet), the reason I took it was at least the office had air conditioning, but it certainly wasn't something I wanted to turn into a career.
As a mid-level windows sysadmin doing customer-facing phone support at a cloud provider, I made nearly 30% more than I had as a junior mainframe guy at a bank/insurance company. The difference in the skillsets and their commonality was massive, yet the pay was significantly worse for the mainframe work despite it being a rare skillset in a high value industry. I remembered when I was in this job that guys who worked on trading desk backend code were far better compensated while working in easier development environments on less esoteric codebases, the mainframe folks were the lowest paid of the developers at that company, at every level of seniority. The only person we worked with who was well compensated was an independent contractor who'd worked there previously for 30 years before retiring.
I had similar beginnings. Late 80s transforming literal reams of 360/70 assembly to “modern” cobol 85. Was still earning my cs degree at the time.
As you know, the pay wasn’t so hot for stuff like that back then. But it was an improvement over manually unloading flatbed trucks stacked with steel conduit, which was my prior line of work!
Today I think it’s much different. Some banks and insurance companies and the like still at least partially run on software as old as the Apollo missions. Maybe I’m wrong, but finding people still alive with that knowledge intact must be difficult and I imagine their compensation reflects that simple supply/demand formula. Shrug.
When I first started work I was involved in banking/insurance mainframe stuff, and it was honestly a pretty terrible working environment for reasons that spanned from the mundane (like dress codes) to the esoteric (like the horrible crufty legacy codebase). I would have put up with it if it paid well, but it didn't. In fact, it paid significantly worse than the job I'd had before which was installing physical cable plant (fiber optics and copper ethernet), the reason I took it was at least the office had air conditioning, but it certainly wasn't something I wanted to turn into a career.
As a mid-level windows sysadmin doing customer-facing phone support at a cloud provider, I made nearly 30% more than I had as a junior mainframe guy at a bank/insurance company. The difference in the skillsets and their commonality was massive, yet the pay was significantly worse for the mainframe work despite it being a rare skillset in a high value industry. I remembered when I was in this job that guys who worked on trading desk backend code were far better compensated while working in easier development environments on less esoteric codebases, the mainframe folks were the lowest paid of the developers at that company, at every level of seniority. The only person we worked with who was well compensated was an independent contractor who'd worked there previously for 30 years before retiring.