Disclaimer: I have not worked directly on mainframes themselves.
They've been doing the same type of work for decades. Batch processing of records and transactions (payroll, insurance, banking, airline booking, etc.) IBM releases new mainframe models all the time, and typically companies will lease them and upgrade every few years.
When I worked at an insurance company, the mainframes were the core of their financials. They had around 8 of them in an active/standby DR site. The machines could do instruction-level error checking, meaning even a weird processor failure/error wouldn't impact the end transaction. Basically if you want to guarantee accurate handling of your money, you use a mainframe.
One common thing to see nowadays is the mainframe becomes abstracted by some other layer of API, such as a rest API. This has reduced the need somewhat for mainframe operators, but in the end you're still interacting with some COBOL that was written 30 years ago and somebody needs to understand it and the hardware. And the hardware is so different from traditional servers, you can't just pick it up and wing it. You really need someone who knows what they're doing.
They've been doing the same type of work for decades. Batch processing of records and transactions (payroll, insurance, banking, airline booking, etc.) IBM releases new mainframe models all the time, and typically companies will lease them and upgrade every few years.
When I worked at an insurance company, the mainframes were the core of their financials. They had around 8 of them in an active/standby DR site. The machines could do instruction-level error checking, meaning even a weird processor failure/error wouldn't impact the end transaction. Basically if you want to guarantee accurate handling of your money, you use a mainframe.
One common thing to see nowadays is the mainframe becomes abstracted by some other layer of API, such as a rest API. This has reduced the need somewhat for mainframe operators, but in the end you're still interacting with some COBOL that was written 30 years ago and somebody needs to understand it and the hardware. And the hardware is so different from traditional servers, you can't just pick it up and wing it. You really need someone who knows what they're doing.