In this episode of the “I Am a Mainframer” podcast, Steven Dickens welcomes Misty Decker, Director of AMC Product Marketing at Micro Focus. Their conversation explores Misty’s career arc in mainframe, advice for those starting out in the space, and how her unexpected journey as a Mainframer started with her first plane ride at the age of 21. Listen to or watch the latest episode to hear Misty’s refreshing industry insights.
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TRANSCRIPT
Voiceover
This is the “I Am A Mainframer” podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundations Open Mainframe Project. Episodes explore the careers of mainframe professionals and offer insights into the industry and technology. Now your host, senior analyst and vice president of sales and business development at Futurum Research, Steven Dickens.
Steven Dickens:
Hello and welcome. My name’s Steven Dickens. And I’m joined today by a dear friend, neighbor, and former colleague, Misty Decker of Micro Focus. Hey, Misty. Welcome to the show.
Misty Decker:
Hi, Steve. It’s kind of odd being on a Zoom conversation with you after so many years of having offices right next door and living a mile away. But you know what? We’ll do it this way.
Steven Dickens:
As I said in the preamble before the show, we should have done this either at my house or a coffee shop in town.
Misty Decker:
I actually recommended that we do it on a walk by the river. Because-
Steven Dickens:
That would’ve been nice. I might have made people a bit seasick as I bounced up and down on a camera, but we should have done that.
Misty Decker:
Yeah. Next time. Next time, we’ll do it. We’ll do round two.
Steven Dickens:
So just for our listeners and viewers, Misty and I live about a mile away from each other.
Misty Decker:
Yeah.
Steven Dickens:
My oldest daughter and Misty’s daughter went through high school together and are friends. So if this goes into two neighbors chatting, I apologize in advance.
Misty Decker:
Alright. Just know daughters are off limits because I’m pretty sure they would kill us.
Steven Dickens:
I think you’re probably right. So yeah, professional hat.
Misty Decker:
Yes.
Steven Dickens:
So let’s get the listeners and viewers orientated. Misty, I know what you do for Micro Focus, but I think it’d be really good to get you to go there first and then maybe give us a bit of a career arc of what got you to Micro Focus.
Misty Decker:
Oh, great. Okay. So I am currently the Director of Product Marketing at Micro Focus. Micro Focus has a full range of software products, security analytics, data management, DevOps. But I’m the director of our application modernization and connectivity division. That’s a lot of words. It basically means mainframes and anything that’s core to the enterprise. So as Director of Product Marketing, I manage the messaging and what we say about these products. And I call myself a mainframe evangelist, or a modernization evangelist because a lot of what I do is just trying to explain to the mainframe community and to the non-mainframe community, what modernization is and help each side understand the other. So that’s pretty much what I do, I consider it trying to help people find common ground when it comes to moving forward with their IT systems.
Steven Dickens:
Fantastic. And as I say, when we were goofing around at the beginning of the show, you and I have known each other for a while now. How did you end up at Micro Focus? The show’s called I’m a Mainframer. Plot a little bit of that story arc and that career journey, if you would.
Misty Decker:
Well, it’s really a funny story because I became a Mainframer because I couldn’t afford grad school and I’d never been on a plane before. So that is my journey.
Steven Dickens:
Isn’t that how all good journeys start?
Misty Decker:
Because you’ve never been on a plane. I wanted to be a research mathematician and I paid my own way through college and got my undergraduate degree. And to be a researcher, you have to have a PhD and I couldn’t afford it. And a girlfriend of mine said, go work for one of these big companies and they will pay for your master’s degree while you’re earning money. So I interviewed only with companies that offered graduate reimbursement programs. And I pretended to like computers because I didn’t, just to get the job. And I’m from Virginia. I had no intention of moving to New York. But IBM said they would fly me to New York for the interview. And I took the interview only to get on the plane. 100% true. The only reason I took the interview-
Steven Dickens:
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. That’s a great story.
Misty Decker:
Was because I wanted to be on a plane for once in my life. And so there I am, 21 years old on a plane for my first time in my life. And I get off the plane and it was, I kid you not, 25 degrees below freezing here in New York. A girl from Virginia getting off the tarmac in Newburgh, New York. And I took my jacket off and I went, “This is amazing.” I had never felt anything so cold before in my life. And it was kind of thrilling. But the reason I took the job, even though I had an offer with GE Aerospace was because the people were so nice, they were so organized. And I figured I’m only going to be at IBM for a couple of years. I can live in New York for a couple of years. What’s the big deal?
So, 30 years later, you know, IBM grew on me. Mainframes grew on me. Instead of getting a master’s in math, I got a master’s in information systems. This technology was so impressive and the things I was able to get involved in and do, and the leadership opportunities I was given very early on in my career. I was leading teams after only a year or two in the company. And I got tapped to be in the very first class of certified project managers.
I got tapped to be the release manager for the very first release of z/OS. I was able to do a lot of really interesting things. And so I got sucked in. I still wonder if in an alternative universe, if Misty the mathematician has discovered some really interesting math. But that is no longer my path.
Steven Dickens:
We need a multiverse to get you to come through and explore that. And it’s interesting that you mentioned that you got the opportunity to do a number of different things. That was my experience of working for IBM, only 10 years, but that was my experience. Maybe just give… We get a lot of female listeners to the show. We get a lot of people who kind of look of, how do I plot a career through this technology? I think you’ve got a fantastic perspective on both of those things. So maybe just expand a little bit on some of the opportunities that this platform’s given you over the years.
Misty Decker:
So, I started in what’s known as system build, where the job was to plan the install path, which is a lot of logic and reasoning because in the mainframe you can pick and choose individual patches that you’re going to install as opposed to in Windows where it’s in a Windows update, which is a whole bucket and you either install it or you don’t. So there’s a lot of logic and reasoning. That’s how I got in the door. But I found I was in my usual pushy self, I was getting involved in some leadership opportunities just because I saw projects happening. And it was that it just bugs me when people are planning a project and they say, “I know what the users want,” but they never go and ask users. So I said, “Well, can we just go and ask them please?”
So, I led a number of initiatives that they were like, “Okay, fine, Misty, you’re in charge.” And I wasn’t the technical expert, but I took that leadership opportunity to drive the engagement with the users and getting everybody on board so there was a lot of negotiating. And so I guess that’s one piece of advice. You asked the advice for young women on their careers is you don’t have to be the technical expert to be the leader. One of the key values of being an expert is knowing who else to listen to.
Steven Dickens:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Misty Decker:
And-
Steven Dickens:
I think that’s fantastic advice.
Misty Decker:
Yeah. So I was able to lead a number of internal projects. I got tapped to be a release manager and get certified in project management. So, gosh, I don’t know. It’s been 20-something years that I’ve been certified, certifiable. And-
Steven Dickens:
I was not going to make that joke. I was not going to go there, but if you want to go there on your own, that’s completely fine.
Misty Decker:
So I am certified. And I was the release manager for the very first release of ZOS, which was interesting because it needed the hardware teams to work with the software teams. So again, I pulled on my ability to get different groups of people to work together and to clear roadblocks. And then I went on maternity leave, which actually turned out to be a career opportunity because I was gone for only about a year and I came back part-time. Everybody told me you’re not going to want to work full-time after you have a child, you’re going to want to stay home and raise babies. And I’m like, “I don’t know if that’s who I am, but let me see.” Well, I tried it and it wasn’t for me. Staying at home as a stay-at-home mom is definitely not my thing. I really need to be in the workplace and be technically challenged.
So, I did take a part-time job. I found I was able to contribute a full-time impact in part-time hours. And I learned a really valuable lesson. And that is, how much of our workday is spent on unnecessary stuff. And if you talk to any working mom, and I guess I would say highly engaged working dads would know this as well, is you very quickly, because you’re forced to, prioritize what’s most important. You have to, it’s a matter of survival.
And so, I think that contrary to popular opinion that I see in the press even today, working parents are highly, highly effective because they know how to prioritize the most important things to do. So then when I was ready to go back full-time, I had been promoted enough that I knew if I didn’t get a manager job, I would never be able to because it would be too high level. I’d be going straight into a people manager at a director level and that doesn’t work. So, I took a first-line manager job in hardware development, and I learned a lot. I jumped into management and hardware. I didn’t know anything about either. And-
Steven Dickens:
I think that’s an interesting point and I’ll stop you there for just a moment. I think the mainframe as a career gives you the ability to… it’s such a broad church. You’ve got both the hardware, you’ve got the software, you’ve got the services, you’ve got the management, you’ve got the deployment of it. I spoke to Jose Castano on a previous show and you can move through this platform as he has done and have very different careers in the same technology domain. And it’s interesting that you say it, so many of the people I have on the show have moved from hardware to software, to services, and back around again and done something different.
Misty Decker:
I love Jose. I worked with Jose back when he was a technical lead and I was a release manager. So I know him from way, way back. But I have the exact same experience. And when I talk to students, we didn’t get to this part of my job role. But my last job at IBM was leading the IBM Z-Academic initiative. So I talked to students all the time. And one of the things I would often say to them is mainframe is not one job. Every kind of IT job you can think of for the most part, there’s a mainframe version of that. So there’s a mainframe database administrator. There’s mainframe analytics. There’s mainframe blockchain. There’s mainframe systems, administrator. There’s a mainframe application developer. There isn’t a mainframe game developer or a mainframe web developer, but pretty much anything else, there’s a mainframe version of it.
So, it isn’t really like going into mainframes is going into a job. It’s going into technology that is at scale and critical and essential. There’s no small work. There’s no small job in the mainframe space. Everything that you do in this space is absolutely critical to that organization and probably too large numbers of people.
Steven Dickens:
So maybe let’s pivot a little. This gives me a perfect segue. What are you doing now? Let’s zero in, we’ve spent a little bit of time talking about your career arc and some of the jobs you’ve had. What’s the cool stuff you’re doing at Micro Focus? We jumped straight past that at the top of the conversation, but maybe just… You and I speak all the time. I see what Micro Focus is doing. I think it’d be really interesting to spend a few minutes talking about what you are doing with clients, how that’s working, because I think there’s some interesting nuggets in there for sure.
Misty Decker:
Well, I think that this connects very well to my IBM career because I really love IBM as a company, but there’s so much of the view is we need to keep everybody in the IBM ecosystem, and the world is much more broad than that. And there was a lot of, “That’s cloud, right? We’re mainframe, that’s cloud. We’re mainframe, that’s distributed. They’re out to steal our lunch. They just want to move everybody off of the mainframe.”
And I always felt like you really need to think more broadly. You need to think about the mainframe is amazing at what it does. So let’s lean into that. Let’s focus on what the mainframe can deliver of unique value that no one can touch rather than trying to be everything to everyone. I literally had a technical leader at IBM tell me, “Why are you doing this game development project on another server? You could be doing that on a mainframe.”
Well, you could, but mainframe isn’t really built for graphics delivery. Use the tool for what it’s best at. And Micro Focus really impressed me with their view of using the right tool for the job. I literally once when I was young and single did not have a hammer and I wanted to put a nail on the wall to hang a picture and I used the handle of a screwdriver to hammer a nail into the wall. It can work, you can make it work. But why not use hammer if you have a hammer? And that is my argument when it comes to IT, is use the tool for what it’s best at instead of trying to make everything fit.
Steven Dickens:
I’d put it another way of just because the car was invented doesn’t mean the train is obsolete.
Misty Decker:
Right.
Steven Dickens:
I ride bikes as you know. People can ride motorbikes. There’re helicopters out there. There’re planes, there’re trains, there’re automobiles. There’s everything in between and all variations of. Certain journeys are best done on certain forms of transport for certain reasons. Me turning up in Lira to go on a flight tomorrow, it’s never a pleasant sight anyway. But I think the point is if you’ve got a platform and it’s good at what it does, use it for what it’s good for. If there’s another platform that’s better at what that platform does and that suits your workload, use that platform. I think increasingly that’s becoming, and I’m going to lead us on with this where mainframe modernizations going. And I’m keen to get your perspective on that word, that set of words.
Misty Decker:
It was very interesting when I left IBM, the number of people that sent me private messages and basically called me a trader, or I can’t believe that you’re leaving IBM to just kill the mainframe. Because they see that word of modernization and they assume that’s all it means. And Micro Focus, and I’ve had long conversations with the General Manager, with our CTO, with everyone. The Micro Focus point of view is that modernization is not about the IT, it’s about the business. And it’s about making the IT meet the modern needs of the business, not moving to modern technology. And so whatever you need to do to deliver that affordably with the least risk to deliver what the business needs today, that is modernization. And when I speak at conferences, I always, always, always include that. One of my favorite sessions that I just did in Share, and I will be taking on the road is, unconscious bias affects technologies as well as people.
And there is bias. If you’re in the mainframe space, you know that there is bias against that word mainframe. As soon as somebody hears it, they assume old, outdated, inflexible, whatever, expensive. We can have a long conversation about how some of that is true in some cases, it’s not true in other cases. It’s really not the mainframe that those things, it’s how it’s used. But I would argue, there’s also bias against that word modernization on both sides of this fence. The non-mainframe community assumes that modernization means moving off of the mainframe and moving to new technology. And it’s on me, as a modernization evangelist, to explain to them how the mainframe could and should be a part of that strategy in the right places. It’s not keep your mainframe, always keep your mainframe. It’s look at it and decide, what do you need to change? What do you not need to change in order to deliver with the business needs?
I have the same issue with the mainframe community. And I had multiple conversations at every conference that I’ve gone to since I joined Micro Focus. It seems like the message is starting to get out there. So I am hearing more and more people repeating that message. It makes me very happy that I’m hearing more people say modernization is not about mainframe or cloud. It’s not even about hybrid cloud. It’s about finding the one solution for that one situation for that one business purpose that is right for that application. In the same organization, you’re going to have many, many different strategies. One application, you’re not going to update at all. And you’re going to leave it on outdated unsupported processors because you rarely ever need it and it’s not business critical. Why invest in it at all?
In other places, you’re going to modernize on the mainframe because you need the speed and the security that only that mainframe can deliver because of the unique hardware underneath it. In other cases, you’re going to say, “You know what? I need to move this application to cloud.” It’s non-critical work. There’s low value response to it. Or, “I really need that dynamic scale out opportunity that is better served on a cloud.” You can scale out on a mainframe, but to a limit. So if you have massive dynamic scale out requirements, that’s probably better delivered on a cloud. So it really, really comes down to the particular application, the particular business need and what you’re trying to accomplish.
Steven Dickens:
I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. I think it’s whether you use the journey analogy, whether you look at it from a workload placement, whether it’s fit for purpose, whether it’s what you just described. I think that’s the level of pragmatism that I’m starting to see start to infuse that conversation around mainframe modernization.
So great discussion there for a while. I’m going to make this personal again. I’m going to go back. I’m going to go back.
Misty Decker:
Okay.
Steven Dickens:
So you get the chance to go back just a couple of years to when you were 21, 22, finishing college. And you get to give younger Misty, if such a thing were possible, obviously being as radiant as you are. All joking aside, you get the opportunity to go back to younger Misty and give her some words of advice. What would those words of advice be?
Misty Decker:
Don’t turn down that cute guy you met at Woodstock. That was my husband. I turned him down the first time and then I realized it was a massive mistake. And it took me a year to get him back.
Steven Dickens:
Maybe that’s the reason why you’re still married today. I don’t know.
Misty Decker:
Maybe, maybe, maybe. No, you know what? I would say that, go ahead and dive into this mainframe thing. I think it took me a number of years to really invest in myself and my career and really see myself as a Mainframer. As I told you at the beginning, I thought I was just going to be there for a couple of years. And even after I decided to not be a mathematician anymore and to stick with mainframes, it took me quite a long time to get into that mindset of, this is a career, it’s not just what I’m doing today.
I was very, this is a fun project, I’ll go do that. Oh, that’s a fun project, I’ll go do that. Oh, that’s a fun… It worked out well for me for some reason. But I think it would’ve been better if I’d really… And maybe some of that is unconscious bias from me thinking of myself as the second income instead of an income as equal to my husband. So I think there was probably some of that going on as well, which is odd for a feminist to say. But yes, unconscious bias you can have that impacts yourself. You can internalize those things that you rail against all the time very easily. And I think that probably would be my main advice is, embrace this technology, embrace your career path and plan it out. I had a mentor that said, “Don’t take the next job without planning where you’re going to go after that.” Every single career move.
Steven Dickens:
That’s great advice. Think about what this job is going to mean for the next job after it.
Misty Decker:
Yeah.
Steven Dickens:
The other question I ask every guest who comes on the show, and I think you are going to have a really interesting perspective on this is, where do you see this platform five years out? I’m not talking about the next release. I’m not talking about the uncertainty. I’m talking, look a little further out over the horizon, and where do you see the mainframe platform? Let’s pick five years from now.
Misty Decker:
Okay. Five years. All right. So I do see a significant acceleration and modernization both on and off the platform. I do think that those smaller companies that are still on mainframe because they’re just running out of support hardware and they’ve only got one person in the company that runs it and it’s a very tiny footprint. I do think that they’ll end up moving to the cloud. It’s just too hard to stand up and manage your own environment and keep it updated when you’re that small. But the larger organizations, I do see doubling down on their mainframe because of the unique features that come from having all of that hardware physically. It’s a physics thing. Electricity takes time to go over a signal and having all of those processors and the crypto cards and the IO processors packed so tightly in that box does have a material impact on how fast it can work. And the security features that are only possible when you control all of that hardware and you can make it custom built the way IBM has.
Those are the two big things. And probably some quantum as well, that we’re just dipping into some of that quantum. It’s going to take more than five years, really for quantum to be mainstream. We’ll start seeing some of it by then. But the workloads that need to be on the mainframe will be modernized on the mainframe.
The only other thing that I really wish I could say is we would see some sort of simplification because the IT environment is just getting way, way, way too complex. Companies have a little bit of this here and a little bit of that here and a little bit of this there. I wish I could say that I would see things simplifying. I am hearing people saying that one of the reasons why they’re reviewing modernization is they want to reduce their IT stack so they don’t have to have so many varied skills across their organization. I think there’s going to be only a small amount of movement on that and I’ll tell you why.
There’re intrinsic motivations for an individual developer, for a CTO to be the first to try something. And you get rewarded socially and often financially for being the first in your organization to try something. So as much as they are successful in moving out, they’re going to be bringing in as much new stuff because new languages are being written. And you want to be the first to use that language, even though it provides no value, you convinced yourself that it is providing value because it’s new and cool. And you really believe that you’re bringing something of value to the organization. But unconsciously what’s going on in your head is, “This is new and cool and I’ll be the first.” So I’m sorry to be a little pessimistic on that part.
Steven Dickens:
No, I think that’s a lot to be said for that. I think chasing the shiny object as I call it, is a trend. Misty, this has been a great discussion. As I say, we’ve been office neighbors, we’re town neighbors. It’s always good to talk to you. I think this has been a fascinating conversation, and I think there’s some unique perspectives you’ve got as you’ve planned a career from a mathematician to be a Mainframer, but also doing that as a powerhouse woman in the industry. So thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
Misty Decker:
Thank you so much. And I’m happy to chat with anyone about mainframe and modernization all the time. I always make time for people that have questions.
Steven Dickens:
Fantastic. Thank you very much for listening. We’ll catch you on the other side. Thanks very much.
Misty Decker:
Thanks.
The “I Am A Mainframer” podcast explores the careers of those in the mainframe ecosystem. Hosted by Steven Dickens, Senior Analyst at Futurum Research, each episode is a conversation that highlights the modern mainframe, insight into the mainframe industry, and advice for those looking to learn more about the technology.
The podcast is sponsored by the Open Mainframe Project, a Linux Foundation project that aims to build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating the value of the mainframe.
