@thomasfuchs as someone who graduated in the late 00s and straight into mainframe work. It's interesting to explain, yeah it's super stable and has crazy transaction volumes it can sustain (the history of IMS is a bit bonkers). Buuuuuut it's a weird working market of older developers refusing to knowledge share and younger devs being locked out of the space by mockery and lack of teamwork and on the job training.
It's going to get real weird when those older devs start expiring.