True, MF skill sets seem to carry grey hair, close attention to retirement benefits, and boring pictures of grandchildren. Not to mention cranky OF's ;-)
Also true is the proliferation of tinkertoy skill sets. But wait, something's wrong with that picture. Perhaps it is that the skill sets are not really comparable. A good DBA is a good DBA, and those skills tend to be platform independent. But many of those skills come with experience in the trenches, so just how good can a DBA be if he/she is below the legal drinking age? But I think (sadly enough) it is much simpler than that: the tinkertoy skills come in a -much- less expensive package. Therefore, the business case is not as clear as we technicians would like to think. A given management team may decide that the high performance, high availability, and high security is not a cost effective solution for their business mission. Let's face it, exploiting those features is hard, tedious, and costly work. Consider: do you charter an 18 wheel tank truck with an armed guard escort to transport gasoline for your lawn mower? Even a multi gazillion dollar enterprise routinely processing megatons of highly sensitive data may elect to deploy a ancillary application on a tiny server. That, in fact, happens all the time. Some potential good news is that auditors may be (finally) starting to apply the same rules to the tinkertoys as the MF. But do I advise young folks to consider the MF as a career? Tune in tomorrow..... My personal $0.02, YMMV, (insert favorite disclaimers here). F wrote: > We use IMS and DB2 on z/OS today and was wondering if we should consider > moving to distributed systems like Oracle or SQL Server. > > Reason being, we are concerned about mainframe skill sets on IMS and > DB2. Also the news around many systems moving away from mainframes keeps > us wondering what to do. > > Can you recommend whats the latest out there ? How many companies are > going through change and away from it and how many companies are > actually going strong and developing heavily on it ? For those in the > latter bucket, what about your skill sets? In my company, half of them > are planning on retiring soon. > > Thank you NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended exclusively for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. The message, together with any attachment, may contain confidential and/or privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, printing, saving, copying, disclosure or distribution is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please immediately advise the sender by reply email and delete all copies. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
