-------------------------<snip>-----------------
With all the respect - I dare to disagree. Totally disagree.
While knowledge of "MVS core" is very valuable, it doesn't necessarily
mean the person who knows it had to work with OS/360, had been witness
of virtual storage introduction, etc. The most clever folks I met are
simply to young to remember anything before OS/390. The persons I know,
which remember VOD (Very Old Days) usually didn't make any progress
since then. I also admit, I know exceptions - very, very knowledgeable
folks who still learn new things.
I agree that management usually cannot say whether job candidate is OK
or simply "looks good". That's why sometimes the rely on tech people to
assess candidate's knowledge.
In my experience 90% of activities in exploitation team doesn't require
any "core MVS" knowledge. It does require good knowledge of "add-ons",
like WLM, SMS, HSM, batch scheduler, RACF, DB2 etc. etc.
I witnessed opinions & complaints like:
"don't tell me about WLM and your goal mode, we DON'T NEED IT"
"ah, that's why my VSAM password does not work. Can we switch to the old
mode?"
"SMS? Why SMS?"
"We don't need RMM. Everybody knows about his own tapes"
"HSM? We can do backups using our jobs (IEBGENER)"
"only UID(0) can access USS shell and files" (common mistake: 700
instead of 755 on "/")
"why to protect all the datasets? PROTECTALL is dangerous"
Young people can be lazy as the old farts, but also can be diligent,
gifted and enthusiastic like the exceptions I mentioned. Those young
guys usually start with "add-ons" and then broaden their knowledge.
--------------------------<unsnip>---------------------------
Bosh Sam and Radislav make some excellent points here; I tend to split
the difference. Some of those new "add-ons" are highly useful and
beneficial for both new and legacy applications; others are really more
useful for new development work than for any legacy workloads. What
always bothered me was that new things came out so fast that it was hard
to become proficient with all of them in a timely fashion. So I tended
to concentrate on those that would provide the greatest benefit to my
current workplace. Doing this and keeping up with the MVS "core" was a
full-time job, and then some. Just converting some of my basic tools to
keep up with the changes in core mechanisms was often a lengthy learning
exercise. Remember chasing ENQ/DEQ information in SQA? Moving to the GRS
address space introduced a whole new mechanism for accomplishing the
same end. And it's us "Old Farts" that are responsible for many of the
tools that seem so essential to us today.
Us "Old Farts" still have important places in the IT world, right
alongside the "Clever kids" of today. We can all learn from each other.
My $0.02
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