Young Mainframe Programmers are the Cat’s Meow.

IBM today introduced a new line of mainframes, the massive computers that businesses have used to process data for decades.

Which raises the question: Where do businesses find people who remember how to program the things?

That’s a question IBM is grappling with, as well. Most computer-science students these days view mainframe programming as the tech equivalent of learning Latin. They’d rather learn Java, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and other hot new Web programming languages. So, since 2004, IBM has been trying to get colleges and universities to include mainframe classes in their curriculums. IBM estimates that 50,000 students have sat through a mainframe class since then.

Students like Elizabeth Bell, a 23-year old computer-programming student at Georgian College in Ontario, Canada, are starting to realize that while being a young mainframe programmer may not be sexy, it’s highly marketable. “There are so many legacy systems out there that it isn’t feasible to think that businesses will phase them out over the next 10 or 20 years,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. Rather than compete with 50 other Web designers for the handful of programming jobs that use the hot technologies of the moment – technologies that Bell says she knows – she taught herself COBOL, a mainframe computer language invented in 1959.

Bell says there are advantages to knowing an older technology. Sure, she probably won’t get a job at a startup. But she did land one at the Bank of Montreal that she didn’t even have to apply for: The bank sought her out because of her mainframe skills. And she’s not competing with any other people her age for managerial positions that are bound to come up. We asked her if it ever got annoying listening to her colleagues reminisce about Woodstock. She didn’t bite.

“I may be the youngest now,” she tells us. “But there are smart, practical kids who are in school because they want a career who realize that the mainframe is the way to go.”