> governments and banks
A look at this (probably somewhat outdated) list (http://ibmmainframes.com/references/a41.html) seems to imply lots of companies with any kind of legacy software still do.
Outside of mainframes, from my own experience, their Spectrum Scale/GPFS (parallel filesystem) is still the default buy in HPC. Not necc the _best_ choice, but still the one you wouldn't get fired for buying.
All 3 of those countries are still in the single European market though, with freedom of movement. Given UK appears to be heading towards a hard brexit and doesn't seem to want freedom of movement I think comparing them directly is a bit disingenuous.
It's not made by someone from an arts background, but as someone with barely any maths background (stopped learning at 16) I found the book Grokking Algorithms[1] a really good way to learn about data structures etc. It's written with more of a focus on displaying algorithms visually. Doesn't go into massive depth, but helped me considerably in developing intuition in a way other typical recommended resources for alg didn't.
I hear this a lot, but do you mean more IT/technician jobs than software engineering/developing?
I'm reasonably sensitive to class particulars and I'm pretty sure software engineering is middle class. Or at least, exactly the same as mechanical/design engineers
If you're interested in academia or scientific research, there is scope to work on open source projects there.
My full time job is working on a particle physics data analysis program, which is entirely open sourced.
You won't necessarily have to do a scientific project either - other people who work at the same research facility work on configuration management systems, or databases.
Note that this doesn't have to involve doing a PhD or actually being an academic - it's more a providing the tools that enable academics to do successful research kind of thing.
Outside of mainframes, from my own experience, their Spectrum Scale/GPFS (parallel filesystem) is still the default buy in HPC. Not necc the _best_ choice, but still the one you wouldn't get fired for buying.