[gnum4n]

As a former P-series/AIX specialist, I can say that the pay is not as good as a decent linux job, and the career growth potential is very low. Your career options are basically to maintain legacy systems until they can figure out how to migrate it all to linux.

And if you get laid off (happens a lot at IBM lately), your career prospects are to either wait for someone to retire/die or learn linux.

No matter how important they say maintaining the legacy systems is, the pay is low enough to easily convince people to take any other IT career path.