Nothing in my previous post was intended to suggest that courses like those that Bernd and Charles conduct are not an appropriate introduction to dump reading/debugging.
They are certainly very helpful, but I was concerned to emphasize the role of colleagues and mentors. I now routinely see situations in which a mainframe shop loses some single person who has critical skills, because he or she retires or goes elsewhere, and then discovers that it is at risk: no one else has the skills needed to do what he or she was doing. This, which I think of as understaffing---It is good, cost-conscious management in the view of others---makes mentoring impossible; and the orderly transfer of skills from one professional generation to the next stops. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
