A while back I had a supervisor at a Chicago company that used to be a meter reader for the company. He was a pencil pusher type that all he did all day was sharpen his pencils and not a clue as to what a manager of a sysprogs department was supposed to do. He had no concept of MVS let alone anything else. He did help out organizing manuals decently, sigh. It was scary as he would never discuss anything and if he made a decision it was based on what his boss wanted more than praticality. Point was that when it came time to order a CPU no studies were done but a group thought we needed one. The group was sort of a laugh. They got into an arguement over how fast a tape drive could could read data and then they said we needed a faster tape drive as it couldn't handle the rewind time (??) fast enough. On and on what ever they wanted he said yes. another point we were averaging 40 percent utilization on the paging volumes they said we needed to be at 20 percent. I asked for proof. They said because we said so. They got the space and even afterwards it never went above 20 percent. He was just so incompetant that he was the laughing stock of the group.
Ed ________________________________ From: Rick Fochtman <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, June 15, 2011 2:22:09 PM Subject: Re: An upbeat story -------------------------------------<snip>-------------------------------------- > The "non-IT" thing is interesting. > > At my company we have many application developers that started elsewhere at > the >company. Me, for one. I personally had previous IT skills, and some >schooling >in programming, but most of the others I believe did not. > > Do non-IT people make better COBOL programmers? Why might that be? > ---------------------------------<unsnip>-------------------------------------- I started college in a "General Engineering" program. I think that was useful as I had exposure to different types of problems from Mechanical, Civil (What's a "CIVIL" Engineer? A polite one?), Electrical, Chemical and Mining situations. It helped me learn to take a broader look at problems and implement solutions that crossed the so-called boundaries between the various engineering disciplines. So I would guess that non-IT people might have a better grasp of the types of problems that others areas of the company might encounter. Rick ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
