Mainframe Interview Cases

Mainframe Interview Cases

By Krishna Rath

February.2014

Copyright Krishna Rath 2014

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author, except for quotations embodied in articles or reviews.

Preface

This book is a collection of scenario based interview questions that have been collated by the author based on his decade long of IT experience. The case starts with a business scene which then triggers a discussion between the interview panel and the job seeker.

Table of Contents

Case # 1 – How to you resolve a s0c7 that has happened in a production job?

Case # 2 – Insurance Company Acquired

Case # 3 – Cards and Compliance

Case # 4 – Instant discounts & delayed transactions

Case # 5 – The case of the missing tooth

Case # 6 – Commissions lost and found

Case # 7 – Make any case

Case # 8 – Modernization and issues

Case # 9 – Called and billed incorrectly

Case # 10 – Quantitative Ability – Filling the swimming pool

About the Author

Who should read this book?

This book is for anyone appearing for or taking mainframe interviews. Please note that this book is not a technical question bank. There are several other good books that have compiled several hundred excellent sets of questions on mainframe. A search on any of the online retail stores will give you the best sellers on mainframe interviews.

Mainframe interview cases, as the name suggests, gives an approach to answering ‘case based’ mainframe questions – the questions will be not direct – rather based on scenarios and will be based on a situation, which the candidate would need to translate into functional and technical requirements. The reason why I wrote this book is that I felt that there is a gap that needs to be covered especially when dealing with "Judging the thought process of a candidate". This book can be used as a base to develop cases not restricted for external hiring, but also for internal learning and development.

Why was this book written?

The book was drafted during my days as a mainframe programmer and after a very bad interview experience. After about a decade of designing and developing business applications for fortune 500 companies, I was asked, in an external interview, How do you fix a s0c7? question. I was a bit shocked to hear this question. I was not sure what to answer. Was the question asked to judge if I had fabricated a decade of mainframe experience? Unfortunately, the answer expected was to check the dump and see the hex value and go to the compile listing and ….

The same happened with several of my friends who had been in the IT industry for several years. I realized that Indian mainframe developers (includes managers) remained a decade or two old in their thought process when it came to mainframe and its application. Much of the Indian IT outsourcing boom happened during the Y2K scare (mid 90s) and the mentality of that era was to expand two digits and ensure that while testing you don’t hit a bad data. Post 2000 when global companies increased investment in mainframe and subsequently multiple technologies and platforms emerged, outsourcing to India increased and it created the mainframe boom. Overnight, training institutes opened providing education on mainframe as well as Java, .NET and 3 tier and n tier