I was a longtime State employee, as a Mainframe Programmer. I knew it was a slowly dying aspect of programming, but it was a good niche for me. Unfortunately, the server world is the glitzy stuff young programmers want now, and the customers are being wooed to the Dark Side. My team kept getting smaller and smaller, as people left (retirement or climbing the IT ladder elsewhere), and their position was given away to someone else in another team. Add to that the fact the brass had no earthly idea what we did and how important we were. Then we have a state government hostile to the state employee. Weird but true. So periodically they cull the herd, getting rid of literally hundreds of worker bees at one time, then hiring more managers to run more departments, with increasingly fewer workers. They attempt t use high tech and automation to replace warm bodies. Then the fancy high tech stuff fails..... Haha.
In the end good longtime workers are on the street, and their jobs go to the private sector, costing the state more money. It's a bad situation all around.
I bailed and retired when I finally saw I and my team mates were on 'the short list' for forced separation. I pity those inexperienced server programmers who will be tasked with rewriting our old mainframe applications into the newer platforms. It'll be a kludge that will not do half what the customer needs. But such is the IT industry.
