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The outside pressure is probably the investigations, including the securities lawsuit, that have already started. The coordinated media campaign is the way to tell the board "hey by the way, this guy is going down", we don't know exactly where "down" is yet, but I doubt this whole thing just blows over with an apology email about an affair.

I'm not a .NET person by any stretch and have been more of a Go person traditionally, but I think from what I've seen IRL, this is accurate.

I work in Mainframes as a Systems Programmer at a software vendor (C, JCL, HLASM, REXX, Shell, a little Python here and there). AMA. My primary operating systems are z/VM, z/OS, and Linux on Z (s390x Linux), typically RHEL.

I've also previously worked as a Systems Programmer at customer shops, and so I have some insight into that as well.

AMA.

I think they should be. Top to bottom hardware and software co-design. I wish they hadn't gone object code only, because I feel like that really ended up causing a lessening of cool software coming out and a too heavy focus on vendor software (back in the old days, the systems programmers at customer shops often modified the operating system and would get those mods put into the OS by IBM for next release, now the sysprogs still modify the OS, but much less likely to be codesigned with IBM if you come up with something cool, and there is less visibility into the source for the OS kernel for z/OS).

But still, the hardware/software co-design and full system suite provided (FreeBSD style) kernel + OS attached really is a great way of doing things and the more I work in Mainframe and also work on Linux, the more I wish Linux vendors took more cues from the Mainframe or FreeBSD worlds.

I suppose you could argue that Oxide Computer is attempting this as we speak. One of the reasons I am a big fan of them.

They are still a standard for Docs, if you look at z/OS docs today, they put all Linux distro and even Kernel docs to shame to be perfectly honest.

Organized PDFs of the order of a thousand pages for literally every subsystem or additional program etc. Over a hundred PDFs in total. Probably 100k+ pages of raw docs.

And that's not even including the Principles of Operations (the mainframe s390x ISA reference).

Generally speaking, students break into it via ISV (independent software vendors, the big ones in this space are IBM and Broadcom but there are many others) apprenticeship and training programs, before getting deployed on site (or staying at the software vendor if you are very good or they have need of somebody junior for a position).

The extreme experience requirements are generally exaggerations. They only happen to exist because there are people who really do have those many years in this field. But I've gotten jobs (I'm a systems programmer, many hats style, z/OS and Linux and C and JCL and Shell and REXX etc) and I've gotten jobs before from these sorts of excessive experience postings before despite me being fairly new to the field (just reaching senior level, about 5 years experience in my subdiscipline, which is systems programming, as opposed to applications programming or security, two other primary specializations for people with CS degrees, there is also operations and IT work available for mainframes but probably the pay rate would be of no interest to somebody on HackerNews).