&gt; So the legacy IBM is dying on the table<p>If it is dying, it will be a slow death.  IBM spent decades entrenching itself in government and Fortune 500 enterprises.<p>The 23 year old Ruby-on-Rails coder sitting at his desk in his unicorn&#x27;s open floorplan office in SoMa may not be aware of it, but there are a ton of IBM machines out there in the world right now, running programs written in JCL, Rexx, Cobol, PL&#x2F;I, and Fortran.<p>The first z196 mainframe to roll out six years ago went to Citigroup ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.informationweek.com&#x2F;it-leadership&#x2F;global-cio-ibms-blazing-new-mainframe-wins-raves-from-citigroup&#x2F;d&#x2F;d-id&#x2F;1092117" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.informationweek.com&#x2F;it-leadership&#x2F;global-cio-ibms...</a> ).  With the pressure for increasing quarterly profits and other priorities, why would Citigroup decide to spend a fortune to upgrade their ancient legacy systems, hoping that there won&#x27;t be too many bumps along the way?  IBM makes it easy for them to keep their legacy systems around - it&#x27;s much cheaper, and it works.  The systems have worked for decades actually.<p>When JPMorgan Chase decided to start cutting down on their IBM usage twelve years ago and start doing more IT in house, they had to strike a deal with IBM to hire about 4000 IBM IT workers ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-03.ibm.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;pressrelease&#x2F;7294.wss" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-03.ibm.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;pressrelease&#x2F;7294.wss</a> ).  Since JPMC just put up a job posting ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jpmchase.taleo.net&#x2F;careersection&#x2F;jobdetail.ftl?job=150104589&amp;lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jpmchase.taleo.net&#x2F;careersection&#x2F;jobdetail.ftl?job=1...</a> ) looking for someone with &quot;Expert Skills in IBM-Z&#x2F;OS COBOL, CICS, VSAM, JCL, MQ, DB2 SQL, Assembler and Stored Procedures&quot;, I&#x27;d guess some of those systems are still in place.<p>Note the location of the job.  Tampa, Florida.  Not exactly the center of what&#x27;s young and hot in the tech world.  More like the kind of place an IBM old timer might go to retire, before he decides he was bored and would like to stick his hand back in and get some work.  This JPMC job ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jpmchase.taleo.net&#x2F;careersection&#x2F;jobdetail.ftl?job=150120585&amp;lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jpmchase.taleo.net&#x2F;careersection&#x2F;jobdetail.ftl?job=1...</a> ) looking for &quot;Experience with z&#x2F;OS ISPF, JCL, and JES2&quot; is in Bangalore.  Not the center of tech, but plenty of people out there are working on these mainframes and with languages listed in the job listings like JCL, REXX, Cobol etc.  These jobs are all at a bank which tried to start weaning itself off IBM twelve years ago.<p>Governments and Fortune 500 companies have plenty of IBM mainframes out there running, often with code written half a century ago in PL&#x2F;I or the like, running business processes which are still used, and they&#x27;re not going away any time soon.