Background

My fascination with technology started when my older brother showed me that it was possible for people to create your own websites, this planted the seeds in my head that it was possible to program computers. I already come from a family where a good chunk of the women work in IT, including my mom. I played a lot of video games as a kid and when I was a teenager I started playing around with lua scripting, I created lots of bad little games but I learned a lot from my failures. I didn't have that great of a childhood, but I survived thanks to programming and my wonderful mom. 

Studying at TEC

In April of this year I started studying IT infrastructure at Technical Education Copenhagen (TEC). It's extremely important to have apprenticeship during the path I chose, but I wasn't having much luck finding apprenticeships despite being one of the few people who had programming experience prior to starting at the school. I would send tons of job applications out and in many cases I wouldn't even get a rejection, I would just be ignored. After a few weeks of studying at the school I attended this job event the school hosted where they had invited companies out to the school, I talked to a few companies and got a job interview at Topdanmark Forsikring (insurance company). 

Interview

My job interview was a group interview. I had actually been an intern there, many years prior (though most of the people interviewing us were from after my time there). After the other students and I had introduced ourselves, and been given an intro to the company, we were given a tour of the IT department. One of the last stops was the mainframe department, they told us all IT generalist apprentices had been offered the opportunity to be in the mainframe department for a while but so far no one had actually done that. They were fishing for people interested in working with mainframes and told us about how efficient and powerful mainframes are. I was a bit surprised to hear about how awesome the mainframe is because I had only ever heard people talk about how old and weird it is. After I got home I started searching on the internet for more information about mainframes and I was really surprised to learn how powerful the mainframe really is. Unfortunately I would get rejected a few days after this interview.

Discovering IBM Z

A few days after I got rejected by Topdanmark I started contemplating new ways of getting an apprenticeship as it was extremely demoralizing getting rejected left and right from more generalist IT job postings. I didn't have infinite time in the world to find apprenticeship. I remembered what I had been told during my job interview, so I messaged one of the people who had interviewed us at the job interview and asked him what programming languages the mainframe department used. He was really surprised that I was interested in knowing more about the mainframe and told me they mostly used PL/I and a little bit of COBOL.

I couldn't really find any good documentation on how to get started started with PL/I so I started playing around with COBOL and the GnuCOBOL compiler (formerly OpenCOBOL). I would eventually complete a bunch of IBM courses on COBOL and mainframes on Coursera.

Interview: Round 2

About 2-3 weeks after I got rejected by Topdanmark I noticed I had missed a call and that the caller had left a voicemail. I gotta be honest I am bad at checking my voicemail but I did this time as I figured it might have been related to my job hunting. When I listened to the voicemail I was shocked to hear it was the solution manager of Topdanmark's mainframe department who wanted to bring me in for a job interview, apparently they were excited to hear someone was inquiring about what programming languages they used. 

At my job interview I was very quickly told they were interested in offering me a spot, which was insane to me because I had gone from never getting interviews to being offered a job on the spot. I ended up talking to a bunch of the mainframers for a few hours until I was politely and indirectly asked to leave by the person who is now my boss. They weren't used to young people showing an interest in the mainframe.

A few weeks later I got my contract electronically and I of course signed it immediately.

Working with mainframes

Since then I have had crazy opportunities like unboxing a mainframe. Not many students can say they have helped unbox a mainframe that costs millions of dollars. Everyone I've met in the mainframe world has been super cool, both at work and outside of work. There's a really good sense of community in the mainframe world.

IBM Z Day 2023

I was invited by the wonderful people at IBM to speak at a panel about being new in the mainframe world, as well as moderate one about air-gapped mainframes. 

Personally I am excited to watch a bunch of the AI presentations, as I'd like to learn more about AI on the mainframe and see if it could be useful for my company in the future. I will also be tuning into to some of the sustainability presentations as I think mainframes are a big part of making datacenters energy efficient in the future.

Register today, check out the full agenda, and tune in to see my sessions:

https://www.ibm.com/community/z/ibm-z-day-2023/