Join host Steven Dickens in this inspiring episode of I Am a Mainframer featuring J.J. Lovett, Lead for Education and Customer Engagement at Broadcom’s Mainframe Division. J.J. shares his decades-long journey from early customer advocacy roles at CA Technologies to leading Broadcom’s efforts in Mainframe Open Education, practitioner engagement, and customer success initiatives like the Vitality program.
From navigating the skills gap conversation to positioning mainframe as a career, not just a job, J.J. discusses how Broadcom supports early-career professionals through Mainframe Open Education, student user groups, and mentorship programs that bridge the gap between new talent and seasoned mainframers. He highlights the changing demographics (millennials and Gen Z now dominating BMC survey data), the role of open source projects like Zowe and COBOL in attracting developers, and why the mainframe’s extensibility through APIs makes it more accessible than ever. J.J. also shares advice for college grads entering a tough job market: start with z/OS Explore, embrace risks, and recognize the long-term opportunities in a platform that’s “still running the world.”
Celebrating Military Appreciation Month – J.J. represents military veterans bringing discipline and leadership to mainframe education and customer success during May’s Military Appreciation Month.
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Transcript:
This is the Mainframe Connect Podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project. Sponsored by Phoenix Software International. Mainframe Connect includes the I Am a Mainframer series, the riveting Mainframe Voices series, and other content exploring relevant topics with mainframe professionals and offering insights into the industry and technology. Today’s episode is another in the I Am a Mainframer series, exploring the career journeys of mainframe professionals.
Steven:
“Hello, welcome. I’m Steven Dickens, your host. You’re joining us on the I Am a Mainframer Podcast, and I’m joined by John from Broadcom.”
Steven:
“Hey, John. Welcome to the show.”
J.J. Lovett:
“Steven, how are you doing?”
J.J. Lovett:
“Most people at Broadcom or in the mainframe space would probably know me as JJ. We’ll go with JJ. It’s a nickname that I go with. I actually refer to it as my stage name.”
Steven:
“Stage name, I love it. So, JJ, tell us what you do for Broadcom.”
J.J. Lovett:
“So, I’m the lead for education and customer engagement for the mainframe division. So, it’s a widespread gamut of different offerings and events that we run. On the education side, we do everything from customer education, executive education efforts, employee development and education, and we also participate with the Open Mainframe Project on mainframe open education. Now, on the customer engagement side, we do practitioner engagement with the mainframe technical exchange and other events, including user groups and other practitioner events such as SHARE, IDUG, and those.”
Steven:
“So, does this fit into what Broadcom calls Beyond Code? Is that kind of broad spectrum where this fits in?”
J.J. Lovett:
“Many different elements do. Beyond Code is pretty expansive. If you look at what is in there, and then a lot of these are not Beyond Code directly, but Beyond Code adjacent, if you will. So, they add to the overall value and offering, either by supporting another Beyond Code effort or just directly in terms of things that happen in what you could term as between contracts or the post-sales experience.”
Steven:
“So, JJ, how did you get into the mainframe? We always try and build a bit of a story arc and sort of origin story, if you will, from the Marvel movies. What’s your origin story on the platform?”
J.J. Lovett:
“Sure. So, it was a mainframe for many years. It was CA back in 2004, which was an interesting time to be joining CA, or CA Technologies, Computer Associates.
Steven:
I was there from 96-99.
J.J. Lovett:
We just missed each other by half a decade. But when I was first there, I was involved in a lot of customer advocacy efforts around customer validation, references, user groups, online communities, and that sort of thing. And that continued as working with the mainframe business unit as it was then, before it became the mainframe division, through a variety of different activities. But I didn’t officially join the mainframe division until the acquisition by Broadcom in 2018. And that was when I came across to participate in the customer value initiative, where we were acting as a customer success group directly with the mainframe customers. To add value, identify opportunities, and really work with our customers and make sure they were getting the most out of our products. And from there, it was a journey and an evolution until I finally landed in this role.”
Steven:
“So, I mean, where do you— I mean, we hear a lot about skills on the mainframe. I’d love to put on that thread a little. I think it’s lazy marketing by the people who are trying to convince people to get off the platform. I posted about this in sunlight this week. I think the demographic is changing. Look at the BMC data and that’s flipped from Gen X, from sort of boomers to millennials and Gen Z for the first time. Where do you see it? I mean, you’re in the trenches here.”
J.J. Lovett:
“So, it’s pretty interesting. We’ve been mixed in what has been identified as the skills gap for some time, right? I’ve been in this role for five years and that has been the primary focus is how do we look at that not only for the customers and the community and the ecosystem.”
Steven:
“I mean, I’m going to dive in there though. Do you genuinely believe that is a skills gap or is it a chunk with pushing out enough people you’ve just got to know where to find them? Because I think we in the mainframe space accept the premise of that that comes from the market. I don’t know if I—if I put a job ad up on LinkedIn for 10 COBOL programmers, don’t think I’d struggle to get 10 COBOL programmers. Maybe I wouldn’t know where to find them, maybe LinkedIn’s not the right watering hole, but is there a skills navigation problem or is it a skills gap problem?”
J.J. Lovett:
“I think it’s a little of both, and it depends on what area of the mainframe you’re looking at. So, if you’re looking at new-to-market mainframers, I think helping them navigate where they’re going to go. And that’s part of the mission of what we’re doing with Mainframe Open Education is trying to draw interest and show them the possibilities are there. If you look at different areas, I don’t know that the development side is the place to look because I think developers are more easily adaptable to fill skills than others. But if you’re looking at large product administrators, operators and sysprogs, I think you will find skill gaps in there because of retirements and other attrition happening in organizations where you know it’s not as easy to fill. Because there you can look at the skills gap more as a time gap. There’s a mainframer… and somebody you meet with daily here, it takes a while.”
Steven:
“Yeah, it takes you two to three to four years to kind of get good at managing a region, for instance, at a senior level.”
J.J. Lovett:
“So there’s the learning and then there’s the application, and they don’t always match up because you’re learning in sterile and austere environments as much as we try and adapt them to be real-world. Going out and seeing how different people have implemented mainframe technologies and the mix of products they have is fairly expansive. So, trying to get someone refined in that area, it does take a long time.”
Steven:
“So, we talked—I mean, we’re obviously on the Open Mainframe Project podcast here—what role does open source play in mainframe careers, either getting people started or enabling them? I’ll probably ask the question in three layers: early-stage professional, somebody moving from one organization to another who’s kind of skilled, and then maybe somebody who’s later-stage professional but moving from cloud administration to mainframe.”
J.J. Lovett:
“So, great question. So, for early stage, people that are new to the mainframe, we basically just try and expose them to concepts around the fact that the mainframe is not legacy, it’s heritage. It’s still the workhorse, big iron within every data center. It’s still running the world in many different regards, whether it’s finance or online shopping at scale and all these different areas that we know exist. But for some reason it has gotten washed up since that article that came out in ’95 or ’96 when they said and claimed that the mainframe is dead. So, trying to reposition the mainframe for its rightful place within enterprise computing overall has been a bit of a struggle, particularly when you look at early career people—they’re really looking at the shiny object and figuring out, you know, this is where I’m going to go and have a long career and figure things out and be, you know, on the cutting edge of technology. That’s always something that’s very attractive. However, when you think about that the mainframe isn’t a job, it’s generally a career, and there are a lot of different paths you could follow. And most of those paths have longevity, not just because people have stayed in the mainframe a long time, but because there is a lot of opportunity throughout each of those areas to grow.”
Steven:
“I like that phrase, career not a job. That’s going to go in my mind for a while. So thank you for that.”
J.J. Lovett:
“Of course. That’s the way we position the Vitality program and some of the other efforts we have within Broadcom. We’re not just offering you an opportunity that’s going to be one to two years. This is something that if you invest in it, is something that could be the rest of your life. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to—either. You can jump to any other part of IT and then come back to it. And that’s almost sort of what we’re hoping is that people view themselves more as technologists. And so if they wind up going to another part and then wind up at some point in management or leadership, that they have that mainframe experience and mainframe knowledge when they’re going out to other areas and they’ll understand, you know, where it belongs within the architecture.”
J.J. Lovett:
“So there’s that. And then for mid-career, there’s a lot of the different projects that are happening that we’re now— from Mainframe Open Education, we’re starting to expand our integration with and we’re working over time with the COBOL project. We haven’t reached out to Galasa yet, but all those other opportunities to understand how open source will now fit with the mainframe, whereas in the past it really wasn’t acceptable. It wasn’t even a thought to bring in any sort of open source or open technologies to work on the mainframe because it was considered the most secure box instead of the most secure…”
Steven:
“I mean, it’s interesting. I mean, I just look at the success of the Zowe project over the last five years. I was in the room when we launched it as a project. And I think it was just everybody was like, ‘We can only open source into z/OS. Why are we all collectively lost our brains?’ You move forward five years, I don’t think anybody thinks that anymore. So…”
J.J. Lovett:
“So, I think a lot of that comes into—I don’t know that people realized how the mainframe had already opened through APIs and access and everything else in order to, you know, do the work that it has to do between. And I don’t know that people give it the proper recognition for the backplane and the speed at which it can process and everything else. So, I don’t know that people understood how open the mainframe was already. And that was the whole concept of secure over secure. And so then, you know, following up with the introduction of open technologies wasn’t really that far of a stretch. It did take some time for people to get their heads wrapped around it and embrace it. But, you know, it’s a really interesting thing to see people understand how extensible the mainframe is in the environment, rather than, you know, the box in the back of the data center that only one person was allowed to go near. And they only go near it to, you know, for existing circumstances.”
Steven:
“So, I mean, the interesting thing for me—and I got these stats from the Linux Foundation team, so I’m probably butchering them, but they’re directly correct—they track 1,500 open source projects across all of their projects and collaborations and frameworks and foundations and whatever they’re called. Zowe is in the top 30 from a code health and activity perspective. And that just blows me away. And we’re talking about Kubernetes, Linux, you know, OpenTelemetry, the hyperledger projects with all the blockchain stuff. You know, we’re talking about some pretty active projects that the LF looks after. And so it’s in the top 30. That, to me, as a stat, kind of blew me away. So to me, right, it’s—yeah, I mean, if you’re looking at this podcast and you’re new to the platform and you’ve not watched other episodes, if you’ve been—I’ve been doing this for seven years, first off. But second thing, going back to your point of playing with the new shiny object, Zowe is one of the top 30 shiny objects in the Linux Foundation. If you want to be on a shiny object, Zowe is probably as good a shiny object as there is.”
J.J. Lovett:
“Well, not just with open source, but across all the vendors, there’s a lot of modernization efforts and shiny new objects coming out across the board. In addition to what’s happening in open source, I think open source tends to be a little bit more entrepreneurial just based on how it works.
Steven:
“All of the kids, if you—or anybody else who wants to—just get in the GitHub repo, roll your sleeves up and get stuck in.”
J.J. Lovett:
“And the amazing thing is when you think about open source, if you are interested in getting involved, the people who you need to engage with to figure that out are easily accessible. It’s not like the traditional, or many traditional, corporate vendor relationships. The people are right there, listed on the website, and easy to reach out to and get more information to get help.”
Steven:
“I think the dynamic for me is that there’s a real community to this. I don’t know whether you would say this as well. If you turn up as a college kid and start getting involved in Zowe, you’re going to get noticed. People are going to put an arm around you. I’ve had a bunch of people on this show over the years who’ve kind of just turned up and just tried to contribute to the community. University puts their shoulder around and puts their arm around their shoulder. ‘Come over here. We’re going to look after you.’ Is that your experience?”
J.J. Lovett:
“It’s interesting. I think a lot of times there’s—mentorship is key in bringing young people in, from the people that have, you know, the more seasoned mainframers that have been around for decades, right? And I think there has been a building relationship, and we’ve seen this in a lot of the engagement we’ve done at SHARE and other conferences, where the people that are more seasoned are becoming more accepting of younger people coming in with ideas. And a lot of that we’re seeing through when the Vitality residents wind up in places or in other work we do with the mainframe experts being placed at customer sites and then act as mentors to other people. So that’s one of the things we’ve been trying to encourage and foster throughout the mainframe space.”
J.J. Lovett:
“It’s just an interesting challenge because there was, I believe, a timeframe—and, you know, going back to 2004 and the early days when I was working with mainframe user groups—there was a hesitance for people to share their information and their knowledge openly because it was considered job security…”
Steven:
“I think we’re 20 years past that. I mean, so we’re kind of going here, but I’ll ask the question. What advice would you give to somebody coming out of college? They’ve got a comp-sci degree, they’re kind of in a tough job market, they want to get a good paid job for a good organization with good benefits. What advice would you give them?”
J.J. Lovett:
“Well, the best place to start is the Z Xplore, right? Go there and see if there’s an aptitude and an interest. It’s a great immersive experience. IBM provides it at no charge, and it’s just a great way to go in and see if the mainframe architecture, infrastructure, coding is something that is in your wheelhouse or in your interest, and you’re willing to climb the ramp to get out of that information. Basically, if this is a technology you find interesting, that’s a great way to get stuck in and started. And the other way is, you know, we have a student user group that we host within Mainframe Open Education. It meets monthly. Right now we’re doing a lot of background around how people got involved in the mainframe and what their careers have looked like, just to demonstrate the very things that we’ve been talking about.
Yeah, that student user group is great because then you also have the ability to interact with the other students. And this is not something that’s just North American focused, which a lot of the different efforts can sort of relegate you. We’ve really made a concerted effort to go global and work with people. We’ve had great interest from folks within the African continent, India, and beyond, where it’s really great to see people expressing that interest. And there’s fairly large competition for the internship that we offer for Mainframe Open Education through the OMP every year as well, which is fantastic to see.”
Steven:
“Yeah, the mentorship program—and this is one of my sort of—I was involved when I got started with the OMP. And what do we? We’re ten years into doing it now? It’s been fantastic to just see the amount of people that have come through that program over the years. You know, we didn’t know whether it was going to be a thing back in the day. It’s now a core tenet of the program.”
Steven:
“So one of the questions I always ask, JJ, and we talked about kind of what advice you would give to other kids at 22. What advice would you have given to yourself at age 22? So you’re now coming out of college, you’ve got to give me a time machine for the day. Buying video stock is not the answer you’re looking for by the way, but what career advice would you have given yourself?”
J.J. Lovett:
“So I answered this question during a presentation at SHARE back when they first went back in person in Dallas, and I think it was 2022. That spring. And I’ll admit the names because what was interesting was I said I was actually offered an opportunity to enter the mainframe very early in my career and did not because I didn’t have the comp-sci degree and I felt that that would, you know, not allow me to progress or do as well in that space. You know, it would be a very steep learning curve. And the interesting thing was at that time someone from the company that I mentioned was in the audience and said, ‘We’ll still hire you.’ So I would say don’t be afraid and don’t think of being a mainframer as just necessarily being a green-screener or working with ISPF commands. There’s a lot of opportunities in the mainframe. That was one of the sessions that we did. It was a panel session at SHARE in Columbus where we brought up a bunch of people that were in different stages of their career and talked about jumping in and out of technical roles and going to things like, you know, my job where, you know, I’m a mainframer but I don’t work on a green-screen terminal every day. I rarely work on mainframe products per se. I do all the other work that helps make the mainframe great for my company, the community, ecosystem, and so on. So don’t be afraid. Don’t let things seem daunting and take a risk now and then because especially when you’re at college and early in your career, that is the time to take risks and be bold rather than be cautious.”
Steven:
“And now we get to probably my favorite question on the show as we start to think about wrapping up, JJ. You get to look forward. You get to look five years out. What does this platform look like—specifically what do skills look like on this platform given your area of expertise?”
J.J. Lovett:
“So I think people in the space have started to at least figure out what the future looks like in terms of their resiliency and what succession planning looks like and everything for the different roles that are included. Trying to figure out where we do have gaps and how we could fill them internally, externally, teaching the skills from scratch, how it is… I think we will see in five years—I’m hoping we’ll pass the sort of reactive phase of looking at attrition that happens through retirements and other means and be a little bit more proactive in terms of figuring out resiliency from within our own organizations or externally. And as the different folks within the ecosystem build the skills, paths, training, other educational efforts and offerings that we will all be familiar enough to say, you know, instead of just ‘be bold’ or ‘go to z/OS Explorer,’ we’ll be able to give them a little bit more of a north star so they can look out five years from where they are, which I think will be eminently more attractive than just saying, ‘It’s not a job, it’s a career.'”
Steven:
“JJ, I can’t think of a better sentence to finish our discussion today on. ‘It’s a career, not a job’ is going to live rent free in my mind. You’ve been watching us here on the I Am a Mainframer Podcast. We’ve had JJ on from Broadcom. Please click like, subscribe, do all those things, share it with a friend, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.”
Narrator:
“Thank you for tuning in to the Mainframe Connect Podcast and this episode in the I Am a Mainframer series, sponsored by Phoenix Software International. Like what you heard? Subscribe to get every episode or watch us online at openmainframeproject.org. Until next time, this is the Mainframe Connect Podcast.”
