Mainframe Brain Drain

[tn3270]

As someone who has spent a large chunk of my career as a mainframe database developer, this article on the Mainframe Brain Drain was interesting. I attend and participate in mainframe database conferences, and have heard stories of organizations hiring VB programmers and then attempting to train them in mainframe technologies. One organization had a pretty good idea to encourage employees to learn the mainframe: They would let you take a course in a new technology (DHTML, Java Script, etc.), if you also agreed to get training in a mainframe database management system. I thought that was very clever and fair.