In my day we didn't have the internet and we learned by writing code and looking up function calls in books and bugging the guy at the computer store.
With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free.
If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.
With all of the free learning materials online you can literally get a university education from top schools for free.
If I was starting out now I would considered it because it's a fast track to employment. When I started out I knew how to program but no one would consider you without an education. That forced me to go to college and learn fun things like COBOL and jcl and many other languages in a short period of time. In the end I rarely use most of those language but if a mainframe opportunity comes up I'm ready. Being forced to learn so many things at once was the real education because it helps in the real world where you are expected to pickup new languages. For some reason my mainframe dev resume bullet points have never been mentioned during an interview. If you can develop for a s/390 that should somehow give you a slight boost for your next javascript role in my opinion.