Hi again, Li-fan Chen,
I guess I can share where I've worked these past twelve years as a mainframer.
Started on May 1, 1989 at McDonnell Douglas, a defense contractor. Luckily, I was in the last group of new hires they put thru full training prior to the comany falling on hard financial times. 240 hours of classroom instruction the first year, 60 hours minimum per year after that, assigned mentors, hand picked assignments to help me grow as a programmer/analyst. Couldn't have asked for a better way to get started as a mainframe P/A in 1989, IMO.
After 4 years and one week, I quit McDonnell Douglas to go to work as a contractor for Edward D. Jones, a stock brokerage and investment company. Now I think it's know as Edward Jones -- without the D. From there, I switched to a better paying contracing gig to work at Blue Cross/Blue Shield, an insurance company.
In October of 1994, I went to work for the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis as a contractor. On March 6, 1995, I hired on at the Federal Reserve as a full time employee where I've worked these past six plus years as a senior programmer analyst. I work in the group called Treasury Relations and System Support.
Don't know why you doubted that I've worked with mainframes much, but I thought I would share where I worked with them the last twelve years since you were nice and helpful enough to post and share as you have. Except for about a year and a half working on a client server project where the server was a mainframe, It's been pretty standard mainframe work; COBOL, IMS DB & DC, DB2, IDMS at the TSO/ISPF CLI. I've never worked developing personal computer (except for client modules the COOL:Gen code generator spit out on above client server project) or UNIX apps. This has all been in the Saint Louis, MO area.
Thanks again for sharing your input,
Take care,
Louis
