On 2/12/2013 12:22 PM, Ted MacNEIL wrote:
Why would somebody go to all that trouble? If they have the time to do that, when are they doing the job they're hired for?
Working as a consultant for a government agency, I had to modify my (batch) jobs calling for tapes to have local control cards listing all the tape serials the job would or might call for (and the system had IBM provided mods to allow up to 100 volumes per file). And the tapes changed during the week in response to production processing. The agency did provide a CP to get the serial list for a specific DSN. After a few weeks I got sick and tired of this, and wrote a REXX routine to remove old cards from the current edit file, do a lookup for each DSN, and build the correct cards after the job card. It wasn't part of the job I was hired for, but it easily saved an hour a day to be used for more productive work. It was adapted by my group, and eventually saw wider use.
I, as a rule, do my job and leave the complex work arounds alone.
I don't want to sound insulting, but there is an old saying that progress is made by the dissatisfied (and possibly mentally unstable <g>). Unless you are a blue collar worker, I suspect there is an implicit assumption that any ideas for improving work flow should be communicated to management. At the agency in question ENDEVOR was used for development, acceptance testing, and production. As a programmer I found this cumbersome. Frequently I would test a subroutine or code snippet using the plain old assembler, and only after working out the kinks integrated the code into the development environment. This was much faster than doing all my work in ENDEVOR.
I think you're giving your programmers too much credit.
Perhaps, but if they couldn't hack it, they needed training. Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
