I work for Broadcom (my e-mail doesn’t reflect that because I am not defined by my e-mail address).
I spent the first 20 years of my career as a sysprog at a few large companies, and the last few on building tech for the mainframe (at IBM, Broadcom, ..) I recall so many stories about how things went sideways and I was called at 2 in the morning or interrupted at dinner to solve a production problem. Some of these stories are one-offs and others are lessons for the future. Personally, over a beer these stories are interesting and we can compare the impacts and how we solved them. Being transparent, I recall an unscheduled change to the CESN panel to add an auto skip to the end of the “Password Field” to the “New Password Field” and ended up causing users to end up revoking their user IDs because of the change in behavior of the panel. Yes, I was twenty something, there was no UX team and it just made good technical sense. Result, a massive fail. I share that story because over a beer its a good laugh 30 years later. Thoughts on being able to share stories about issues / failures (hopefully not like mine which was self imposed) to help others see issues and take action to help build the next generation of Sysprogs? I’d love to share my more esoteric issues like unable to allocate a dataset because of a hashing problem with a VTOC IX caused by a batch job creating crappy data set names. Anyone know of a forum or a way to capture the knowledge before we lose it ? Thoughts ? Matt Hogstrom [email protected] +1-919-656-0564 PGP Key: 0x90ECB270 " — Hogstrom ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
