I agree that mainframe access is an issue. Hopefully the Academic Initiative and the Mainframe Challenge will see more students with much more access to mainframes.

For those who don’t understand why they should get involved in the CICS community I think there are at least a few reasons.

1) Job security – the more people involved and working with CICS, the more skills we have available and the more likely CICS customers are going to stick with CICS and the mainframe.

2) Making work fun – us “young ones” have a nasty habit of coming up with wacky ideas, some useless, some not. Help invigorate your work place with some fresh new faces with lots of great ideas.

3) Network with others and meet-up at conferences

I think the age issue is just a mind-set rather than an actual limiting factor.

Thanks
Chris

I think the problem we are facing is that the pool of eligible developers is much smaller when it comes to potential mainframe programmers and systems programmer. At this point only a selected few students have access to mainframe related classes and very few even know anything about the mainframe nor do they care. They have FREE access to programming languages(C/C++, PHP, PERL, Ruby etc.), enterprise class operating systems(Linux), Transaction processors(Apache), Databases (DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc.). In most cases they even have access to the source code of these products and can really dig in if they want.

There is NO entry point into the mainframe.

Anybody can go home after work and write a piece of software to provide a service or to sell using PHP, MySQL and Apache. (That’s what I did with the CICS Community Forums]). I would have loved to do that on CICS but at what cost?

Where is the CICS Community Edition?.

There are a few people in the CICS community that really cares about the product and are willing to go out of there way to promote it and get the community involved it. Most people just shrug shoulders and ask “Why ?”

Maybe our average age has something to do with it? 49.5]

Regards
Ian