GadgetsDownunder

Retired Mainframe Pros Lured Back Into Workforce

from slashdot - 8 months ago

Businesses that cut experienced mainframe administrators in an effort to cut costs inadvertently created a skills shortage that is coming back to bite them. Chris O'Malley, CA's mainframe business executive VP, says that mainframe workers were let go because 'it had no immediate effect and the organizations didn't expect to keep mainframes around.' But businesses have kept mainframes around and now they are struggling to find engineers. Prycroft Six managing director Greg Price, a mainframe veteran of some 45 years, put it this way: 'Mainframes are expensive, ergo businesses want to go to cheaper platforms, but [those platforms] have a lot of packaged overheads. If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.'"