In this episode of the “I Am a Mainframer” podcast, host Steven Dickens honors Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by featuring Jessielaine “Jelly” Punongbayan from Dynatrace.
Jessielaine recounts her inspiring journey as a COBOL programmer, beginning in the Philippines and expanding to various countries worldwide. She highlights the invaluable support from mentors and the mainframe community, shedding light on the unique advantages and vast opportunities within the mainframe industry. Delving into her role at Dynatrace, Jessielaine discusses the seamless integration of mainframe with modern tools and technologies. Her passion for mainframe is evident as she talks about her active participation in the open source community, especially in the Open Mainframe Project and OpenTelemetry.
Jessielaine’s heartfelt advice to her younger self shares an optimistic vision for the future of the mainframe platform, emphasizing enhanced integration with contemporary tools and user-friendly interfaces.
Tune in to this insightful and inspiring episode!
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TRANSCRIPT
Announcer:
This is the I Am a Mainframer podcast, brought to you by the Linux Foundation’s 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 to another episode of the I’m a Mainframer podcast. I’m your host Steven Dickens, and I’m joined by Jessielaine from Dynatrace, or should I say Jelly?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yes. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. Jelly is fine. It’s my nickname, so you can call me Jelly.
Steven Dickens:
So this is your second time on the podcast, so we’re going to make you famous on this. I think we spoke during the pandemic about some of the work you’re doing on COBOL, but let’s kind of dive in first here. Let’s get some introductions, tell people a little bit about yourself and what you do and we’ll use that as a jumping off point.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yeah, sure. So I came from the Philippines. I originally had, my first job is actually a COBOL programmer. So originally out of graduation I started off with mainframe. As a programmer trainee. I trained with COBOL, I worked with COBOL, with a green screen and stuff like that. And then I guess after three years I moved to Singapore as a global consultant. And then after that I worked in IBM in Czech Republic, transferred to Czech Republic as a mainframe support engineer. And then I worked with Broadcom, moved to Prague and there I work with mainframe modernization. And that was the time that you first interviewed me. I worked with Zowe Explorer. I’m part of the open source Open Mainframe Project. I’m working with Zowe Explorer, I’m a tech lead there. And then after that part I moved to Austria, which is now my job. And I’m still working with mainframes. I’m working for Dynatrace, which is an observability platform. And there they have an observability for mainframe and that’s where I come in. I do the support there.
Steven Dickens:
So we traveled around the world there in a few sentences, but recording this episode to coincide with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. So I’ve got to take you back. Take me back to the Philippines, how you started that journey. And I lost track of how many countries you mentioned. I think I heard Prague, I think a whole bunch of places there in your journey. So maybe let’s just unpack that a little bit and then we’ll get back to the COBOL and Dynatrace and the kind of observability piece. I’ve got some questions there as well.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Of course. So in the Philippines, right out of college I was looking for a job and there was this local bank, they’re looking for a programmer training because normally COBOL is not taught in the schools. And so they said that they will have a programmer trainee where they will teach the students or who wants to join COBOL. And when I joined, I don’t know anything about, COBOL
Steven Dickens:
You started completely blank. No knowledge. Literally the first opportunity to jump on to one of these platforms and kind of get going.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yes. Zero knowledge. I know about Pascal, I know about C, I know how it looks. But COBOL is something that I have nothing. I have no knowledge about it. And there was this great mentor that I had, she was really, really good. I’m impressed with her because she typed really fast and she’s doing some sorting with JCL and then running it and then showing us that this is how you do sort and in GCL. And then she shows, she showed us some COBOL programs, some simple things. And that really fascinated me because I realized that COBOL is so easy, let’s say in comparison to Java and it’s like just using display. If I want to display something, if I want to go to somewhere, you do this, you perform this. So I liked it so much that I said, Hey, I want to pursue this. I want to go to the mainframe department and I want to do COBOL. And so they hired me as part of the current account. So since it’s a bank, we are part of the current account department.
Steven Dickens:
So I think there’s something, I’ll jump in there. I think there’s something interesting that I don’t want to lose before we move on. There’s a lot of talk about languages, Java, Python, insert cool language into this. And there’s this kind of stigma, if you will, about COBOL. But I’m really fascinated if you just didn’t come in with those preconceptions, you just got onto what was probably a green screen, got into a sort of IDE type environment, maybe on a mainframe, could have been quite clunky and just went, I’m going to judge this on what I see and found COBOL a bunch of fun. You’d maybe worked on other languages before but found it a bunch of fun. I think a lot of people are kind of saying things about that in the industry. I think your personal experience is really fascinating for me about you just jumped on no preconceptions, found the language super easy to learn, working for a bank straight out of college, probably a great job straight out of college if it was working for a bank as a junior COBOL programmer. I think that’s a really fascinating story. We have a lot of students watch the show who are thinking about their first career move. I think that lack of preconceptions is really vital. Am I capturing that right? Am I thinking about it right? Based on what you said?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean there’s a lot of preconception that in my experience, they find mainframe very scary. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s unknown, nobody is teaching it at school. So it’s something maybe they said that it’s very important. So maybe it’s a lot of pressure for them that they don’t want to make a mistake. And then there are, let’s say the resources are maybe it’s not easy for them to get it. It’s hard to find. So that’s maybe the preconception. But when I tried it out in college, when there was an opportunity for me to do it, I really loved it because I feel like it’s like I’m playing a game that old games where you just, I dunno, it’s like I’m
Steven Dickens:
Playing Tetris or asteroid or something. I’m showing my age now, but yeah,
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Exactly. It makes you think and it makes you so resourceful. That’s what I like about it. That’s why I describe my mainframe experience as something like doing art, being an artist, because you become very resourceful, you think a lot of ways on how to do it. Because sometimes if you do, let’s say JavaScript, there are a lot of packages available there. You don’t really know what’s going on in those packages. But with mainframe you need to understand how it works. And that’s what I love about it. I need to understand each and every step so that I could support it or I could do something with it. And yeah, I guess maybe that’s more about me rather than, I don’t know, that’s what I see.
Steven Dickens:
You touched on something there that’s interesting. You touched on people think this may be pressure, a junior program working at a bank. How did you find that experience? Because I’m assuming that the team you went into was pretty established professionals, long tenure in the company. Here’s me giving some of the preconceptions. How supportive did you find that environment when you landed?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
I had very great support during that time. I have a great mentor. The team is amazing. Sometimes they scare me if I did something and then let’s say it blink and then they’re what did you do? What did you do? And then I was really new.
Steven Dickens:
You broke the bank with your code!
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Cursor is blinking, what have you done? And I don’t know, it was really, really scary, but it’s just I didn’t do anything. It’s just normal for the cursor. So sometimes there are things like that. But after, they have supported me so much because they wanted me to learn. And so it’s like my journey as a mainframe developer. It’s so fun because I have a lot of seniors who are willing to teach me who are very generous in sharing their knowledge.
Steven Dickens:
And that’s a consistent theme I hear. I speak to a lot of junior professionals on this show. We’ve had a whole bunch of them on and I go to Share every year, a couple of times a year, I can’t think of a more supportive community for early professionals than the mainframe. You are embraced, they see you as the future. They’re steward of the platform that when they retire they want to infuse you with those skills. The knowledge and the passion for the platform as well.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Exactly.
Steven Dickens:
I think
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
I think that’s it!
Steven Dickens:
It comes across, it’s palpable. I think it comes across from my interviews, it comes across from my in person interactions. Everybody’s trying to drag the next generation of mainframes along with them for the ride.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
I think I agree with you, it’s the passion because you have a choice to get out of mainframe. I mean it’s your choice to do a lot of technology like modern technology out there. But me, I’m choosing mainframe because I like it. It’s basically a passion of mine — the mainframe. So I guess that’s why we’re very supportive of each other because this is our choice. And if somebody’s, let’s say, having an interest in this, you want them to see the beauty of mainframe.
Steven Dickens:
I certainly feel that. And so we started in the Philippines, you start in your path as a junior COBOL developer for a bank in the Philippines. You ran through a whole bunch of countries very quickly there. I think I heard Prague, I heard at least somewhere else in Europe. Maybe let’s just touch on that piece and then we’ll get to Dynatrace.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
So the beauty about mainframe, when I started out, they said that it’s something, well they call it a dinosaur, but it’s something that is in demand, I’ll use the word in demand. And so I could go places and they’re right. After three years of working, I was able to go to Singapore. And then after I was able to go to Czech Republic, and then Prague, and then now I’m in Austria.
Steven Dickens:
And was it your skill at COBOL on your mainframe, that was the ticket for that ride?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yes. So it’s mainly because I went to Asia or to Singapore mainly because of COBOL. I was able to go to Czech Republic because of the general mainframe knowledge because I was doing support at that time. And then I went to Prague because of that IBM knowledge that I gained from IBM, the mainframe system knowledge.
Steven Dickens:
That’s fascinating for me that you are able to do the Philippines, Singapore, Singapore, to the Czech Republic, a couple of different jobs in the Czech Republic, all because you’ve got this one skill that’s in demand.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yeah, exactly. Which is, for me it’s mind blowing because I heard that mainframe’s dead, you can’t have any jobs there. But it’s not true. I actually got a lot of jobs and I was in demand and there are a lot of countries who are looking for employees who was willing to pay me to be there.
Steven Dickens:
It’d be interesting to get your perspective. We see, my personal hypothesis is that if you are a college kid and you can go out and fight tens of thousands of other students to be a Java programmer or you can go out and fight tens of other people to find a job in COBOL, which is going to pay more. Have you got any sort of ability to validate my, you obviously graduated, you’ve probably got some friends in college, you are a few years into your career now. Have you seen that trajectory versus where the rest of the graduating class was?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Maybe I’m referencing, let’s say the Glassdoor pay. If I check that and I compare it with my salary, I’m going to say maybe above the medium line. And when they normally pay me that or that’s my asking rate, basically they’re giving me my asking rate simply because I have a skill that it’s not known for everybody. And I think as an Asian who wants to go, let’s say to Europe or even America, they’re willing to support my visa as well, which is something hard because here in Europe you need to prove that nobody has this skill before you can have, it’s
Steven Dickens:
The same in the US. I mean I just celebrated 10 years in the US as part of the visa process. For me to get my green card, I had to demonstrate I had a unique skill. The unique skill I had was knowledge of the mainframe. It sounds like that’s exactly the same unique skill you were able to demonstrate to do what is that two or three different job moves in different countries?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yeah, exactly. So it’s like for me it’s a real advantage and that’s a good thing that I could share with others who’s thinking of going to IT in general.
Steven Dickens:
So let’s start to wind forward. There’s a lot going on with the OTeL space with regard to the mainframe. I track a lot of the observability vendors. I’m off out to Splunk’s conference in a few weeks time. I’ve been briefed by team at Dynatrace and a bunch of others. BMCs got observability tools here. There’s a whole bunch of these guys kind of focused in on this space. I think what we’re seeing with the OTeL community, and I know some of the work the Open Mainframe Project’s doing to kind of collaborate with the OTeL community. And I’m assuming that’s where you are sort of plugged in. But what’s that connection with Dynatrace? Maybe just expand if you would Jelly for me.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Yeah, of course. So Dynatrace is an observability platform. I’m going to talk about in mainframe perspective in general. So they do have a feature where they could actually get metrics and traces or infrastructure monitoring information from the mainframe itself and then display it into the Dynatrace UI, which is not a normal 3270 screen. It’s like a website. And the beauty of this, the beauty of Dynatrace is that it’s all in one UI where let’s say if you’re a bank and you have mainframe, but you have other things, you can monitor it in one UI. So that’s the advantage of it. In regards to OpenTelemetry, I agree with you, there’s a lot of buzz around there and Dynatrace is definitely interested in it because I believe personally that if we have OpenTelemetry for mainframe, we can get more information because right now what Dynatrace is doing is a real time data information. So what CICS, IMS, it’s from mobile to mainframe. So if you access your mobile, let’s say you view your account information to the mobile application and then it goes to a DB2 call, you can see all of those trace, that end-to-end observability trace in a Dynatrace UI. What they don’t have is the batch. So if we have OpenTelemetry and the customers can use OpenTelemetry, they could actually create their own Dynatrace apps so that they could also monitor their mainframe batch. And that’s what I’m excited about and I’m looking forward to that.
Steven Dickens:
And is that where you are working with the Open Mainframe Project on that kind of OpenTelemetry connection point between Dynatrace and that sort of mainframe classic kind of environment? Is that the work you are doing in the open source community?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
So far? Yes. I mean with OpenTelemetry right now, it’s in a very early stage, so I want it to be part of it, at least I want to be informed about it. And then as time goes by, I hope that I’ll be more involved in how to have more monitoring or observability in terms of OpenTelemetry and open mainframe project. I actually wanted to connect OpenTelemetry and Zowe. That is my ultimate goal personally. That’s my ultimate goal. And we’ll see.
Steven Dickens:
I think that’s a fantastic goal. So that gives me a great segue. I’ve asked you these questions before, but maybe we’re a few years on now, so I’ll ask you these questions again. I always ask them of all my guests, it pulls out some great answers. So there’s two questions. First question is you go back to your 21, 22 year old self, you’re starting out in the Philippines. Based on what you’ve seen over the last few years, what would you go back and tell yourself? What would you go back to young Jelly and say this is what you should know?
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
I think I’m going to tell myself that number one, I want to tell myself that I need to be patient and as well as to trust my gut because I have great decisions or at least I have great instincts and I should follow that and don’t doubt it. And the thing that I would suggest to know is to be, let’s say, more involved in open source. I was involved in open source later in my career and I think it would be nice to be part of it when it was starting so that I have more knowledge. Let’s say I have hybrid knowledge in terms of Open source as well as mainframe because it’s really fun. I love open source a lot and I love contributing in that space. So it was really, really fun for me.
Steven Dickens:
Fantastic. Second question I ask and it’s going to be really interesting. I’m going to go back and watch the other episode, and compare your answers. Where do you see the mainframe platform maybe three years from now? You’ve got a fantastic global perspective. Working for somebody, I would say is not a mainframe vendor specifically. I think if we were to do a poll of who’s a mainframe vendor, everybody’s going to know who Dynatrace is, but maybe they’re not going to say like a Rocket software or a BMC or a Broadcom or an IBM, they’re not going to instantly associate. So you’ve got a fantastic perspective, where do you see the mainframe maybe three years from now? Maybe three to five years.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Three to five years from now. I see the mainframe being more, let’s say involved with, how do I say it? Being more involved or improving more with integrating with modern tools. That’s how I see it, especially for me who works with Zowe, with Dynatrace in general doing APIs. I think with the APIs right now, I think it’s very nice to integrate it with mainframe. A lot of companies right now, a lot of vendors will have their own mainframe support because there are a lot of tools that you can use and there are a lot of scenarios that you can do with mainframe and I would love a lot of modern companies to be involved in that. That’s what I wanted and hopefully I also wanted more interaction with a modern UI in mainframe, because that’s what Open Mainframe project is doing, right? It’s like a candy wrapper for mainframe. And so I wanted that to grow more and to have, let’s say, to spread more in a lot of areas in IT.
Steven Dickens:
Fantastic Jelly, it’s been great to have you on the show. Again, always welcome to come back. I think we’ll be chatting again in the future. You’re doing some fascinating work. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode where we’re celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month. So I really appreciate you coming on the show. Fantastic to talk to you again.
Jessielaine Punongbayan:
Thank you so much. It’s really, really great to talk to you. Had a great time.
Steven Dickens:
So you’ve been watching another episode of the I’m a Mainframer podcast. I’m your host, as always Steven Dickens. Please click and check out the other episodes. Go back and watch Jelly’s previous episode for sure, so you can check in on her journey. We’ll see you next time and thank you so much for watching.
Announcer:
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