I just read an article today about Big Iron’s Catch-22 http://www.esj.com/news/article.aspx?EditorialsID=1520. It raises an interesting truth in our business. the more stable and secure your system is the more likely you’re going to be scheduling maintenence rather than rapidly dousing fires. That scheduled maintenence leads to opportunities to outsource to lower cost areas of the world. This is especially true of mainframe pros that are typically old coots like me and relatively well paid because of our experience and tenure.
Sometimes it seems like the reward goes to the pros that barely and drammatically keep their systems together rather than the pros that have all of the trains going out on schedule.
I take great pride in having a very solid shop. I wonder if there isn’t such a thing as too good a job. I read a post from another discussion where someone said something to the effect of “if I could have robots do everything I would.” I’m not going to suggest that outsourcing to countries with much less expensive workforces is the equivilent of robots but it does strike me that there is a real business motive that plays against us old timers working wit systems that take a licking and keep on ticking. My team does a lot of interesting work and my company has already outsourced traditional IT operations so I’m not thinking about me specifically but people like me generally.
Am I alone on this one?
