Comment by zeeframe
4 days ago
Not a dumb question at all! In Europe I’ve seen a few training programs held by companies looking to get new talent in to learn from the older techs. Browse around and see if any companies around you have something like that.
There are some free resources available that will allow you to get training but I haven’t tried them myself. IBM Z Xplore is worth a look as an example: https://www.ibm.com/products/z/resources/zxplore
I hope you find a way in, more mainframe developers and sysadmins(often called systemsprogrammers in the mainframe niche) are always needed.
Edit*: Spelling and grammar
I’ve run through a bunch of ZXplore and it’s more fun than I expected.
They have it hooked in to VS Code now. It’s weirdly modern. And you get to play on a real z machine.
Recommendable summer/holiday tinkering project. It’s amazing how much and yet how little has changed in computing and transaction processing.