All very good points indeed.

I've been working for this person for over three years with side-business, we have a solid understanding of each other and I understand their brands and projects because of this. I also know that the work is steady enough that the company is still going and growing after those three years.

The scope of work luckily is an ongoing thing, basically the position is technical lead for one of their largest clients and also technical lead on a lot of new business as well.

I'll admit, there is a large degree of impulse in my decision here (turned in resignation today ack!), but also I've been working towards this goal for years now and have built a solid relationship and understanding with them, if nothing else it will be a lot of new and exciting experience and I think the next logical step in my career. I just can't see myself moving any further/faster with my current company.

There is always a contract though (I have one with them right now already for the projects I'm working on).

We'll see how it goes, hopefully it turns out alright and I won't have to go out in search of another job in the near future haha!

Thanks for your input, very well thought out.

Thanks, and yes, I am looking for some kind of hidden gotcha, because it sounds a little too good to be true. Maybe I'm just skeptical as it will be my first job outside of a corporation in this field.

Thanks for the input, the lack of face-time I can handle, right now my "peers" at work are all uninterested COBOL programmers aside from the one other .NET guy, so I won't be missing much haah.

That's it, I'm throwing away my G1...this whole time I thought it was a server.

When you consider that not only do these systems run a lot of batch processing daily, they also have user interfaces through things like CICS, which users are allowed to login and initiate jobs. Most of the time it has it's own form of concurrency in which it will lock certain datasets for processing and release them when it's done. Of course, it's still possible to get deadlocks and other issues because of this.

In my experience, the reasons are mostly just because it's been the standard for so long at said shop.

Most people using mainframes don't make money off of their IT department, their programmers are expensive and don't produce profits. Investing in a large change from "what works and has a fixed cost" to something new and possibly troublesome or more expensive (initial cost) just isn't a priority for them.

Not to mention the retraining you'd have to do. A lot of these programmers are either old and unwilling to learn, or just uninterested in rocking the boat. So is it worth it to have to fire people or get subpar code, or just stick with what's working that keeps you generating a profit and keeps your current programmers job security?

Some people still refuse to invest in DB2 though, and so you're stuck with VSAM/Flatfiles for your data. It's a horrible time sink.

Right, and incredibly high speeds is definitely accurate. I can't remember the amount of instructions/second our mainframe can handle, but I remember it being in the multiple hundreds of thousands.

Several hundred Kilohertz? :-)

It IS incredible - but modern Computers are even more incredible.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it. It frustrates me on a daily basis, especially without having a relational database for some critical information.

:) I don't think he's talking about clock cycles...

A friend of mine always says "Your code should explain what it does, comments should explain why.". I agree with with you and him completely.

I wanted to open some dialog with you about this, but I believe your email address might be incorrect or there was an issue with how I converted it that I can't find. Care to send me a message?

just sent you a message, and the correct email is: btown cooperative village at gmail, with dots between those words. Sorry about the typo above - it looks like I can't edit it any more.

Just letting you know, I don't think the dots in gmail addresses are required. You can place them anywhere in your address and it will still get to you. Handy way to sort your inbox bases on who used which version of your email address.

I can't help but feel a tinge of enlightenment from reading his articles. Maybe not enlightenment, maybe....reinforcement. Thank you so much for posting this link.