August 9, 1999

Recruitment: The Legacy Challenge

By Martin J. Garvey

ood help is hard to find--especially when it comes to recruiting personnel to support legacy environments.

Customers of mainframe systems applaud how easy they are to manage and maintain. The tricky part, they say, is convincing today's programmers that working with Cobol code isn't the equivalent of mastering a dead language--that is, a technically impressive task, but one that's not particularly exciting and isn't worth as much in the market as newer programming skills. "We have to go through a learning process with some people who don't want to program in Cobol because they perceive it as not elegant," says Jim Shelton, IT director of petroleum company Global Companies LLC. So far, Shelton has been able to maintain its Unisys mainframe by using a staff of five IS professionals, but he notes that "the people supporting Unisys are getting older, so we have to convince people used to coding in C++" to make the switch.

Steve Matheys, VP of application development at Schneider National Inc., agrees that prospective programmers often care more about working with the newest tools. But he says he can provide them with that experience: "The S/390 is not your mother's mainframe anymore," he says. The Visual Age application development environment from IBM lets Schneider developers write Java applications on Windows NT workstations and run and deploy them all on the mainframe systems. He also says he's had success recruiting programmers for his legacy platform because they like Schneider's total work environment, including excellent compensation packages. "Our turnover is in the single digits," Matheys says. "Our new hires are not just Cobol rejects that come off the scrap heap."

E Funds, a business unit of Deluxe Data Corp. that develops and markets electronic funds transfer systems for businesses, uses both IBM mainframes and Compaq's Tandem Himalaya NonStop Kernel systems. Mike Nell, VP of product development, says it's a challenge to find programmers and administrators for the Tandem platform, which doesn't offer the same level of automated management features as mainframes. "This midrange environment is a challenge for any new people," Nell says.

E Funds chose Himalaya and S/390 systems for one key reason--high availability. "If a 747 lands on the data center," Nell says, "these systems don't flicker." Recruiting IT personnel to ensure that both platforms continue to function at that level is a high priority. Without these platforms, E Funds can't move money, or authorize and complete transactions. "The Internet is a 7-by-24-by-365 operation, and our business objective is to provide 7-by-24-by-365 operation," Nell says. E Funds processes about 50 transactions per second, and any downtime requires a lot of explanation to customers, Nell says.

The situation may improve, though. By next spring, observers say, many experts in legacy systems working for companies specializing in year 2000 issues may be looking for new jobs.

Return to main story, "Legacy Systems: Reinvest Or Restructure?"

Illustration by John Bleck

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