[Techtalk] OT - advice needed

[BUNTER MATTHEW]

--- Reçu de       VITEUR.BUNTERMA 04 72 96 57 77             21/08/02 11.18

All,

Apologies for writing this but I need unbiased advice from clever people.

I'm in charge of a mainframe (OS390) team of four that contains two people
about to retire. The company I work for haven't got around to advertising
for replacements. Not sure if this is intended or not.

The mainframe we work on is being moved to another country. That other
country already has consolidated 13 other mainframes into it's site.
Needless to say I don't think there is much future for the mainframe here!!

So I've asked for a transfer. My past experience is in IT Security -
policies standards procedures etc as well as compliance checking and
IDS (even got to do some penetration testing a few times). However the
security dept here is one guy on the firewall so not alot of possibilities.

My question is this, which area would people think a thirty year old (who
is quite frankly not a programmer and who doesn't like the management side)
should go into?

The options are :
Oracle team - this seems the most interesting to me and the one I am
pushing for.
Unix team - for my age I think that this will be a disadvantage if it comes
to changing companies even though I would have 75% of the competence rqd
Network team - done a bit on Cisco, know my way around Etherent,
subnetmasking, how to read a packet
Websphere/Intranet - application server stuff, need to program in Java
(scares me) good opportunity to learn a lot of web stuff, seems like a good
future but the software would only be used by LARGE companies (which I am
becoming less and less fond off).
OR : remain management side. I don't want to do this, I don't enjoy it but
the money here in France is better for managers than techies.

Hard choices so need some helpful advice - please.

Rgs,

Matt

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