IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design

Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by djhworld on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @12:26PM (#18495586)

Really enjoyed reading this, even if I didn't understand a lot of the jargon.

I find mainframes fascinating beasts, I don't understand how a programmer would be able to make use of all those "CPs" but it sure looks like a lot of power to use!

It's very exotic, maybe too exotic. I'd imagine hiring junior people and training them up on these things is a lot of effort and probably very hard to hire for - in competition with the companies offering cloud experience etc

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by wilsonnb3 on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @09:08PM (#18499679)

I was hired as a junior software engineer for a mainframe company, and it is indeed very hard. zOS was radically different from anything I had done before and it took a long while before i felt comfortable with it.

IBM actually holds a very good week long training you can send junior developers to. It’s basically a boot camp. There were about 10 other developers at it when I went, most of whom were fresh college grads from the big mainframe software companies (BMC, CA, Rocket, etc.).

I’ve since moved on to the world of .net and I don’t miss the mainframe stuff at all.

Edit: I’ll add that a lot of what made it difficult for me was that I was working with assembly language and our product required a lot of knowledge about the OS. Many mainframe programmers are using java and eclipse, which isn’t that different from using java and eclipse to target any other system.

[ Parent | on HN ]