I was your friendly IBMer. I started fixing 1401s in 1966, I went to hardware/software school for 360s in 68 and was plucked out for field program support on DOS, the real one. They killed that career path when they pulled all the assembler level support back to a Hudson valley cube. Not for me.
I went back to hardware and ended up as region support for 135, 138, 145, 148 and 158. That was fine. We had the documentation and they broke a lot. When I was in Endicott support for the 4341 I started understanding mainframes were never going to be fun again. They seldom broke and the field didn't have any documentation when they did.
I kept myself busy with check sorters and big laser printers.
That trend got worse in the 80s and I moved to Installation Planning, contract services, building computer rooms, connectivity (LV) and TP support. Computers may not break but they were big honkers that needed a special big room with lots of interesting stuff in it. It was fun for a while.
When I saw the first announcements for the RAMAC (a rack full of PC hard drives) and the 9672 (the first blade server type machine, still running MVS) I knew the whole business was going away.
These days, that acre of raised floor is a small room and nobody really needs to go in it. Mainframes are basically just big file servers.
The raw number of mainframe shops is probably 5% of what it was in the 90s.
A clue, in 1987 there were 47 IBM folks in Ft Myers Fla. Now there are FOUR and 2 of them are exclusively printer or desktop guys. None of them do much with anything we would call a mainframe.
There are NO IBM software guys here. That support comes from a guy with a funny accent named "Bob" from halfway around the planet.
I made myself very happy being an electrical inspector.
