----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Fairchild" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 11:27 AM
Subject: Re: IBM driving mainframe systems programmers into the ground
IBM, as a profit-making corporation owned by stockholders and presumably
incorporated somewhere within the USA, has a legally required fiduciary
duty to its stockholders to maximize the value of their stock. There is
no such required fiduciary duty to sysprogs, the homeless, downtrodden,
political refugees, or any other class of people on earth. Nor is IBM
required to maintain any allegiance to the USA, support its wars, or
recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag at its annual stockholders
meetings. Any stockholder who feels strongly enough about these other
concerns is free to propose his enlightened ideas to the rest of the
stockholders at their annual meeting. If enough other stockholders also
want to help the droves of underemployed sysprogs, then they can demand
the appropriate changes from top management.
Freedom and free competition are two-edged swords. If I want my employer
to have the freedom to sell a software product that induces its purchasers
to eliminate huge numbers of salaried employees and I make my living from
such software, then I ought not complain if other businesses also have the
freedom to compete in such a way that I lose my job, assuming no coercion
or fraud is ever involved (which, of course, makes my argument irrelevant
in the human realm).
I am not happy that IBM will someday do something to end my software
development career prematurely if they possibly can, if that makes them
more profit. IBM will beat anyone or anything into the ground that its
top management feels is necessary for IBM to continue its highly
profitable existence. They have done so in the past with large
competitive businesses (NCR, RCA, Amdahl, e.g.), and so now they are doing
it with sysprogs. To paraphrase the Hyman Roth character from Godfather
part deux: "It's not personal. It's business. This is the business that
we chose."
I still maintain that if IBM makes its mainframes installable and
maintainable by a partially trained chimpanzee, then it will cost a
customer a lot less money to hire one full-time chimpanzee than a human,
thus making the total cost of ownership to the customer lower, thus
allowing more customers to obtain such mainframes from IBM, which can
still make its profit by not lowering their charges to their customers.
No one needs a telephone operator any more to make a local phone call.
Even a chimpanzee can do it. And now anyone can afford to own his own
phone.
Bill Fairchild
Ah, the unbridled capitalism über alles, laissez-faire, let-them-eat-cake,
Marie Antoinette post. Thank you Bill, for focusing the discussion.
First off, I'm all for capitalism, supply-and-demand, and so forth. We've
all seen bill rates rise and fall over the years as the economy ebbs and
flows. I have no problem with that at all. The main problem I have here is
that IBM is using its purchasing power to subvert the supply/demand curve.
They have lowered rates and salaries to unheard of levels. $20/hour for an
experienced system programmer is an absolutely unprecedented bill rate. On
the other hand, IBM is claiming that they face a shortage of experienced
z/OS system programmers, so they re-started the previously failed academic
initiative and SHARE started zNextGen. So if IBM is telling the truth, and
there is a shortage of experienced z/OS system programmers, then bill rates
should be going up, not down. At the very least they should be static.
But clearly IBM isn't telling the truth. There is no shortage of system
programmers for z/OS. I have 2 friends, good solid sysprogs, that had to
take these IBM jobs, and watched as IBM ratcheted them down from 40, to
37.50 to 35/hr, then a 32-hour work week, and then fired them. $35/hr and
you're making too much. Think about what that means. IBM is saying $70K/yr
is too much for a z/OS sysprog. Who is going to do this job for less when
other jobs pay more? The best sysprogs will do something else, and the only
ones left will be the ones who can't do the job. I still maintain that no
college kid in their right mind would go into z/OS at these rates and
salaries. At some point, there will be a shortage of z/OS mainframe talent,
and then the shoe will be on the other foot.
I've seen some people tout z/OSMF as the end of the sysprog. z/OSMF is at
least a decade away from making any significant dent in the sysprog
workload. Right now all it can do is send dumps to IBM. CA is currently in
the lead with its MSM product, but even that is only an install tool that
doesn't address deployment. It still doesn't indirectly catalog targets,
which is something the sysprog has to do on their own. I've been asking
vendors for this feature for the last 20 years, and only IBM supports it in
ServerPac. Speaking of ServerPac, how many sysprogs has it put out of
business? You still need to know the system and how you want to install it.
I submit that z/OS will NEVER be installed and maintained by a chimp
(present company excluded). While the install may be simplified,
maintaining the system will always require a skilled hand who knows the
intricacies and the subtleties of z/OS.
So IBM is looking to increase profits by cutting people costs, and
supposably lowering TCO for z/OS. It's an easy sell, because those costs
are hard dollars. What about the soft dollars due to lost productivity and
increased downtime? Those costs are often not quantified, so while it looks
good on paper, the savings often don't materialize.
Case in point. I was working a contract a while back where the client
decided to bring in a bunch of low-cost consultants ($60/hr at the time) to
do a lot of z/OS hardware config and parallel sysplex installation. These
guys were real cowboys, going in to weekend windows without an
implementation or backout plan. After a number of failed windows, they
succeeded in getting the client to freeze all work, which nearly caused the
client to terminate the entire project. On my first weekend window before
the freeze, I presented my 70-step implementation plan, complete with
backout. The client's sysprog thanked me for providing the first
implementation/backout plan they'd seen. My jaw hit the floor, as I wasn't
aware of what the other lowball guys were doing until then. Suddenly all
the problems we had became crystal clear. There's a reason all those guys
came so cheap. As far as the cost savings, those evaporated when the
freezes pushed the schedule out 6-9 months, and increased people costs
across the entire project. My own hours for the project were doubled from
the original due to the delays caused by the low-priced consultants'
screw-ups. Bottom line, you get what you pay for.
Regards,
Tom Conley
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