Mainframe Systems Programming: Interview with Aileen Wynne

Aileen Wynne is a mainframe systems programmer in AIB. In college she hated the idea of working with computers, but now considers her job to be ‘the best job in the whole universe’!

Many people have never heard of mainframes but they are used by many major companies across the world, including banks, insurance companies and many more. If you’re thinking about pursuing a career in computers, it is worth considering mainframes.

Keep up to date with Science Angles by following us on Facebook and Instagram!

A mainframe is a data server that securely processes large volumes of transactions and calculations. Aileen is standing with a mainframe in the image above!

What is your job? How did you get to where you are now?

So I started off hating computers and never wanting to work with them. I swore blind I’d never work with computers, I’d never work for the bank and I’d never get married. So never say never, because now I’ve been working for the bank for 22 years, 23 years, something like that. 

I came in and started in the mainframe network team in the bank. Prior to that I’d been a childminder for a number of years. I had moved from that into looking after the IT for a charity, working with Apple networks and Apple hardware, and liaising with their engineers. I was looking after their databases as well. It was basically the Apple version of Access, so it wasn’t a big database or anything, but that’s what I did.

I left that and I came into the bank working in the mainframe network team, and I did that for a couple of years and it’s never left me. Even today I was looking at a network problem, in fact two of them. So then I moved from that into the host support team, basically the same team that I’m in now although I did end up doing storage for a few years.

So what I do day-to-day is I look after the installation and the maintenance of the operating system, some of the major subsystems, so DB2, IMS, CICS, MQ and then I look after some non-IBM, smaller products, many of which are old and we’re trying to get rid of in the bank. That’s kind of what I do. 

What did you study in college?

I did general science: computer science, biology and maths were my main subjects. I did physics in first year as well. I did a lot of role-playing games, spent a lot of time in the library, did a bit of fencing. I didn’t study an awful lot in Maynooth, but I got through, I passed it, I have a degree from them. 

So when I went into college my mother told me I had to do computers and I hated it. I had to do science at university and I had no interest, but I was good at that kind of stuff. Best years of my life, absolutely highly recommend Maynooth, it was brilliant. I didn’t like my subjects but the place itself was brilliant. Actually I quite liked biology to be fair, hated computers, came out saying I was never going to work with them and then realised that actually it’s not a bad career. And once I got into the mainframe stuff I love it. I absolutely love what I do, it is the best job ever. I think I’ve the best job in the whole universe.

It’s great to see how much you love your job!

I think you should enjoy everything you do, wherever you are. There’s always bits you don’t like, don’t get me wrong. Even in my job, the best job in the universe, there’s also loads of crappy stuff that you have to do every day, like there’s change records, compliance stuff. There’s other people that love compliance and love the stuff I don’t like, but you have to do the horrible things as well as the nice things, don’t get me wrong. There’s always naff bits to everything, but if you get really good of them you can do them quickly, so you get rid of them so you can do cool stuff. Or at least that’s how I work. 

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

It depends on the day, to be honest with you. My job is one of those jobs where the good challenge is that I’ll never know everything and there’s always new things to learn. Every time I do an upgrade, or every time I’m putting maintenance on or anything like that, it’s always a chance to get my head around what’s different now, or what’s the best way for me to implement this feature or roll it out, because we have multiple LPARs, which are like servers to roll stuff out to.

 Then you’ve got the bad challenges, like how am I going to get rid of this compliance stuff I have to do today. But I only have to do that every couple of months which isn’t too bad. I think they’re the biggest challenges.

But if you like learning things mainframe is one of the best places ever because no matter how brilliant you are, no matter if you’re the greatest person at what you do in the whole world, you still won’t know everything. You’ll be an expert in one little tiny bit, but you won’t know everything. It’s my favourite challenge ever, to learn everything, and you can’t learn everything, you can only learn a lot about one thing or a little bit of everything. You can’t do it all. That’s the biggest challenge, but it’s also one of the beauties of it.

There’s no point in having a day where you don’t learn about at least one thing new, and most of the time I’ll learn more than that. Sometimes it’s only a small little tiny thing, I might be sitting beside someone and they use a keystroke shortcut on the mainframe that I’ve never seen before and it’s like ‘oh my God, this panel is brilliant!’. Or other times it can be a whole new technology or whatever. There’s always things to learn.

It’s funny, my sister’s always said that the worst thing she can imagine is my job, because it’s very 9-5, which I’m always baffled by because I’ve never worked 9-5 in my entire life. It’s an office job, you go into the office, you sit with the same people, well pre-covid we sat with the same people, and we’d be dealing with the same people all the time. But actually in reality that’s not how it is. Yes you’re in a team with the same people and you’ll talk to certain people every day, and there’s other teams that you’ll work with on a weekly or monthly basis, or just every so often. 

My routine is similar in that I go in and I check if there were any problems overnight. If there are, obviously I work on them. If there aren’t, I usually have a number of things that I want to get done in a day that I’ll start working on. Which goes really well until about an hour later, when people start arriving and asking me questions and pulling me away to different things. It’s great.

Lots of people have never heard of the mainframe. When I was in college one of the things that turned me off computers was that it was my second week in the class, there were about 120 of us in the class, and the lecturer was telling us about what computers were. One of the lads said to him ‘what about these mainframes?’ and he went ‘mainframes? Sure they’re nearly gone’. This was 1991, he goes ‘mainframes, they’re dead. There’s still a couple of them knocking around but they’re pretty much dead’. I was far too shy to say anything at the time, but in my head I was like ‘my dad works in a mainframe, I don’t think he’s right’.

I definitely don’t think he’s right now, after twenty years I can see myself working on mainframe for another twenty, thirty years. I don’t think even then it will be gone, I think it will, as it has done for the last fifty years, reinvent itself. It will look different and it will morph into whatever is needed at the time, that’s what it does. 

How would you usually approach a difficult problem?

Good question, I think it depends on the problem. I think, first of all you have to work out what the actual problem is, what are you actually trying to solve. Once you’ve worked out what you’re trying to do, what’s the outcome you want? Then you need to work out ‘how am I going to get there?’. But it depends very much upon what the problem is.

 Is the problem actually what we see it as? So for example, as I mentioned earlier, I do networks, I also was on the storage team for a while. One of the problems we had recently was a particular area came to me and said ‘we’re having a problem with the network. We have two nodes, we’ve basically a server that’s trying to talk to CICS and it’s not doing what we expect it to do.’ So I started looking at that, and I looked at the network stuff and all the network stuff looked fine. I checked if there were any files involved that were too big for there, there wasn’t. 

It was kind of ‘hang on a minute, what’s actually the problem?’. Because talking about a network problem is very low-level and as we delve further into the issue it was like we were expecting certain things to run and this CICS transaction to run, but it’s not working, we’re not getting the outcome we expect. We brought other people in to look at it from the CICS team and we were able to find out that it was actually that somebody had made an application change, however from the outset they were saying ‘oh it’s a network problem’. So you have to be very good at looking at what problem you’re presented with and working out if that’s the actual problem or if that’s a symptom of the problem and then working from there. That’s kind of how I approach it.

Thank you Aileen for telling us about mainframe programming! If you’re interested in learning more about mainframe careers, or STEM careers in general, be sure to follow @ScienceAngles on Instagram and Facebook!

5,827 thoughts on “Mainframe Systems Programming: Interview with Aileen Wynne”

  12. Today, taking into consideration the fast life-style that everyone leads, credit cards get this amazing demand throughout the market. Persons throughout every area are using credit card and people who are not using the credit cards have arranged to apply for just one. Thanks for expressing your ideas in credit cards. Alys Douglass Prowel

    Reply

  15. After I originally commented I appear to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on each time a comment is added I receive four emails with the exact same comment. Is there a way you can remove me from that service? Thanks! Claire Hakim Trip

    Reply

  16. Hey there. I found your web site via Google at the same time as looking for a comparable matter, your website got here up. It seems good. I have bookmarked it in my google bookmarks to visit then. Lauree Hillyer Johathan

    Reply

  17. I was excited to discover this website. I wanted to thank you for your time just for this fantastic read!! I definitely appreciated every bit of it and I have you saved as a favorite to see new stuff on your site. Talya Richmound Hendrika

    Reply

  18. Et tamquam accommodare definitionem mei. Ea mea dicant eleifend. Te vis eripuit accusata vulputate. Eam iusto urbanitas ad, veri mnesarchum definitionem usu et, sit id purto deserunt pertinacia. No quod intellegebat ius, no vim quem consul rationibus. At nec euismod iudicabit instructior. Maurizia Gal Jobe

    Reply

  20. Amazing blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere? A theme like yours with a few simple adjustements would really make my blog jump out. Please let me know where you got your design. Cheers Lacie Hunfredo Hubble

    Reply

  21. Everything is very open with a really clear explanation of the issues. It was definitely informative. Your site is useful. Many thanks for sharing. Cris Braden Lauryn

    Reply

  22. However, you could possibly soon learn that everything said to be free usually are not necessarily beneficial to you. On a similar note, you should be sure that his or her bank will allow the pay outs being received at his / her bank. Playing at free casinos online can sharpen your gambling skills because you can play casino games without risking your money. Filia Kendrick Teriann

    Reply

  23. This web site is actually a walk-through for every one of the details you wanted regarding this and also didn?t understand who to ask. Glance below, and also you?ll most definitely uncover it. Candra Paddy Martica

    Reply

  26. I truly wanted to send a brief message in order to thank you for those awesome information you are writing here. My time consuming internet search has at the end been recognized with excellent facts to write about with my neighbours. I would state that that most of us readers are extremely fortunate to be in a remarkable website with many outstanding professionals with useful tips. I feel rather lucky to have seen your entire webpages and look forward to so many more exciting minutes reading here. Thank you once again for all the details. Ruthanne Eben Genni

    Reply

  27. This is my 19th move. I told my husband that my next move will be in a box. I am not planning to move for a long time either! Meggi Herold Pallaten

    Reply

  29. Hi there, for all time i used to check webpage posts here in the early hours in the break of day, because i love to learn more and more.| Toni Erwin Andra

    Reply

  32. Somebody essentially lend a hand to make seriously posts I would state. This is the first time I frequented your web page and up to now? I surprised with the research you made to create this particular post incredible. Fantastic activity! Myrilla Flinn Baten

    Reply

  33. Nice blog here! Also your web site loads up very fast! What web host are you using? Can I get your affiliate link to your host? I wish my site loaded up as fast as yours lol| Hildegarde Tito Whitcher

    Reply

  34. Hi there. I discovered your web site by means of Google whilst looking for a similar matter, your site got here up. It looks good. I have bookmarked it in my google bookmarks to come back then. Adrian Garv Zeculon

    Reply

  35. Greetings! Very useful advice in this particular article! It is the little changes that will make the most significant changes. Thanks a lot for sharing! Danielle Elmer Faubion

    Reply

  38. great publish, very informative. I’m wondering why the other experts of
    this sector do not notice this. You should continue your writing.
    I am sure, you have a huge readers’ base already!

    Reply

  39. Do you have a spam problem on this site; I
    also am a blogger, and I was curious about your situation; many of us
    have created some nice procedures and we are looking to swap solutions with other folks,
    why not shoot me an e-mail if interested.

    Reply

  42. Excellent post. I was checking constantly this blog and I am impressed! Very helpful information particularly the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was looking for this particular info for a long time. Thank you and good luck.

    Reply

  44. The road seemed to stretch on endlessly before us, but Alexis assured me that our journey was near an end. We’d turn before long into thick woods and travel through narrow, winding roads until we reached her family’s cabin. I had no choice but to trust her as GPS had given out nearly 20 minutes ago.

    “There’s good wifi and okay reception at the cabin,” she’d told me, “but you can’t get there unless you know the way.”
    https://rentry.co/d8g5w
    So here I was, driving alone in the middle of god knows where with a girl who was my student just a couple of weeks ago. Her and her four best friends had been together from first grade all the way through high school and now they had graduated with very different futures ahead of them. They had decided to kick off “the best summer ever” with a week long stay at Alexis’s family cabin. Alexis and I were heading up before everyone else, the four other girls and four guys.

    Reply

  46. Hello there, just became alert to your blog through Google,
    and found that it’s truly informative. I am going to watch out for brussels.
    I’ll appreciate if you continue this in future. Lots of people will be
    benefited from your writing. Cheers!

    Reply

  51. Good day! I know this is kind of off topic but I was wondering which blog platform are you using for this site? I’m getting sick and tired of WordPress because I’ve had issues with hackers and I’m looking at alternatives for another platform. I would be awesome if you could point me in the direction of a good platform.

    Reply
  58. Pingback: good questions to ask on Tinder
  68. Pingback: oasis free dating website

  190. By way of introduction, I am Mark Schaefer, and I represent Nutritional Products International. We serve both international and domestic manufacturers who are seeking to gain more distribution within the United States. Your brand recently caught my attention, so I am contacting you today to discuss the possibility of expanding your national distribution reach.We provide expertise in all areas of distribution, and our offerings include the following: Turnkey/One-stop solution, Active accounts with major U.S. distributors and retailers, Our executive team held executive positions with Walmart and Amazon, Our proven sales force has public relations, branding, and marketing all under one roof, We focus on both new and existing product lines, Warehousing and logistics. Our company has a proven history of initiating accounts and placing orders with major distribution outlets. Our history allows us to have intimate and unique relationships with key buyers across the United States, thus giving your brand a fast track to market in a professional manner. Please contact me directly so that we can discuss your brand further. Kind Regards, Mark Schaefer, marks@nutricompany.com, VP of Business Development, Nutritional Products International, 101 Plaza Real S, Ste #224, Boca Raton, FL 33432, Office: 561-544-0719

    Reply

  265. Rizk Casinon sivusto on runsas, mutta silti taydellisen mallikelpoisesti jasennetty ja siten helppokayttoinen. Se pelittaa yhta ketterasti niin tietokoneella kuin mobiililaitteillakin. Sisaltotekstit on kirjoitettu hauskasti ja ammattitaidolla, raataloidysti juuri meille suomalaisille. Esimerkiksi bonusehdot on selitetty kiitettavan mutkattomasti ja ymmarrettavasti. Kaytannon matka neuvoja, joiden avulla voit valita paras aika lomalle. Varaus, arvosteluja ja neuvoja hotelleissa, Resorts, loma-asunnot, matka paketteja, ja paljon muuta! https://luminosity-masks.com/profile/marcelafigueroa/ Greentuben Book of Ra -pelisarja lienee jo tuttu monille Egypti-teemaisten videokolikkopelien ystäville, onhan tämä alun perin fyysiselle pelikoneelle tehty ja sittemmin nettipelaamiseen sopivaksi tuunattu pelisarja Greentuben suosituimpia tuotteita. Hyviä uutisia – lisää on tarjolla! Book of Ra Deluxe 6 vie sinut jälleen muinaisen Egyptin maisemiin Indiana Jonesin oloisen hattupäisen sankarin johdolla ja meno on vain entisestään koventunut. Katsotaanpa vähän tarkemmin, mitä Greentube on tällä kertaa keksinyt!  

    Reply

  352. I absolutely love your website.. Excellent colors & theme.
    Did you build this amazing site yourself?
    Please reply back as I’m trying to create my own personal website and would love to find out where you got this from or
    exactly what the theme is named. Thank you!

    Reply

  357. Excellent post. I was checking constantly this weblog and I am inspired!
    Extremely helpful info specially the remaining part 🙂 I handle such info much.
    I was looking for this certain info for a long
    time. Thank you and good luck.

    Reply

  368. I have been surfing on-line more than 3 hours these days, but I never found any interesting article like yours.
    It’s beautiful price enough for me. In my view,
    if all site owners and bloggers made good content material as you
    probably did, the net can be much more useful than ever before.

    Reply

  374. It’s appropriate time to make some plans for the future and it is time
    to be happy. I have read this post and if I could I want to suggest you some interesting things or suggestions.

    Perhaps you can write next articles referring to this article.
    I want to read even more things about it!

    Reply

  385. Its such as you learn my mind! You seem to know so much approximately this, such as you wrote the guide in it or
    something. I think that you just can do with a few p.c.
    to pressure the message home a bit, however instead of that, that is
    great blog. An excellent read. I’ll definitely be back.

    Reply