Arthur T. wrote:
At one time when we sysprogs were overworked, a consultant was
brought in to update an SMF exit. He made numerous elementary
mistakes. After about 2 weeks, I finally got time and updated the
program in about 6 hours. During those two weeks, the consultant was
working on it constantly and had had at least 5 IPLs to test his
changes. We ended up not paying him for his time. He was American.
Should we now generalize about the skill levels of Americans?
Definitely! <g>
Almost ten years ago I got a short term consulting gig at a
small ISV. From what I gathered, they had continually downsized,
and lost most of their experienced technical staff. I was asked
to clean up their flagship product that kept getting 0C4s and
other nifties. They had hired temporary programmers (Americans)
a year earlier to make some improvements, and got a little more
than they bargained for - I found things like MVC byte,C'A' and
other sins that showed complete incompetence, as well as a lack
of testing. I wound up writing an assembler exit to flag low
storage references (address fields in the listing, not by
register content), excepting LA and such, and found more than a
dozen more.
The original program was written in the seventies (early VTAM
user), and was very elegant, except for one teensy, tiny flaw -
all exits used the same save area, and the first time I did some
hard testing managed to trigger two exits concurrently. It
really made me wonder how this had been working in production
for twenty-odd years.
So I consider the current state of affairs a management problem
related to hiring practices and pay policies (at one job I had
an interim boss who decided to hire a systems programmer without
bothering to talk to me. The guy knew JCL well, because his
prior 'systems' job consisted of fixing JCL errors in production
jobs. His knowledge of computer languages extended to knowing
their names). Over the years I've had colleagues from every
continent except Antarctica, and found no difference in
competence, If anything, on average, the foreigners were better
educated.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, VT
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