I think I would go nuts with a job like that. I'd call it drudgery, same ol' shit, day after day. It would be far more interesting to convert the mess to C or C++. Measure performance improvements, cost effectiveness. Is govt running Cobol on seriously antiquated computers/mainframes - hard to source parts and equipment? Maybe there is a niche company supporting the old stuff that I'm not aware of? If so, they can about name their price.
Then go compare the price for a powerPC box (AIX) and a standard x86 with VMWare licensing.
That's where they are selling for price point. AIX does LPAR (logical partitions, essentially a fucking VM with a different name). And that comes free as part of AIX...
What they dont tell you about, is licensing all of your addon (DB2, applications not included) AIX software by processor cores, the cost of ram, having to deal with one of the shittiest abortions of a website (IBM), the abysmal support....
I can imagine, and sympathize with those dealing with it.
I still don't understand why an executive decision to convert away from Cobol never happens. I'd guess a lot of it could be written far more efficiently, in a modern language on modern and readily available equipment. The sheer number and size of those legacy programs plus program interdependencies may be the excuse, IDK.
I think it is slowly making its way out. In '16 I was part of the team that built Amex's new internal cloud platform. That platform was designed as an in house test bed for the dev team to write their way out of the mainframe.
I moved on after it was all said and done, and all 10K vms moved form ESX to Openstack. But that was the stated goal of the project.
I think between gov & banking they are the people keeping AIX and HPUX alive. Everywhere else seems to have moved on.
I have never worked on a unix (not linux, thats everywhere including my home) outside of those 2 sectors.
I had a Sparc workstation running unix in my cube, plus a PC back in the late 90s-early 2000s. I loved it, what a powerrful machine!
Alas, Sun is now a property of Oracle. Sun Solaris 7 was pretty cool.
(post is archived)