Posted by Mike on Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 270 views
By Murray Hill, For Postmedia News
I’ve been writing a weekly technology column for over twenty years and the time has come to move on. I retired from my “real” job in the fall, and have found that the busy time of retirement makes writing more and more difficult, so it’s time to say goodbye.
I’ve often been asked what my top ten tech products of all time would be, so what better time to do that than my last column? So here goes.
Posted by Mike on Sunday, November 7, 2010 - 772 views
As long as there are mainframes, there will be Cobol. Learn the language and the culture and you might land a job that that lasts until retirement
A career as a Cobol programmer might not be as sexy as slinging Java code or scripting in Ruby, but if you buckle down and learn hoary old Cobol, you could land one of the safest, most secure jobs in IT.
Analyst reports indicate that Cobol salaries are on the upswing. The language is easy to learn, there’s a healthy demand for the skills, and offshore Cobol programmers are in short supply — plus, the language itself holds the promise of longevity. All that loose talk about mainframes going away has subsided, and companies committed to big iron need Cobol pros to give them love.
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Posted by Mike on Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - 316 views
When Giorgos Tsapepas started as an intern at IBM in 2002, he had never used a mainframe. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the university he attended in upstate New York, there was no instruction in handling the powerful machines that tackle complicated computing tasks for such industries as finance and health care. Now a mainframe expert, Tsapepas had to learn his specialty on the job.
Teaching mainframe skills is out of vogue at many universities with the advent of newer approaches to solving the biggest computing challenges. At the same time, many of the engineers capable of tinkering with the refrigerator-sized machines are nearing retirement. The average age of mainframe workers is 55 to 60, according to Dayton Semerjian, a senior vice-president at CA Technologies (CA), the second-largest maker of software for mainframe computers after IBM. “The big challenge with the mainframe is that the group that has worked on it—the Baby Boomers—is retiring,” Semerjian says. “The demographics are inescapable. If this isn’t addressed, it will be trouble for the platform.”
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Posted by Mike on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 125 views
Baby Boomers are about to begin retiring en masse. So … who will mind the mainframe?
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