It depends on the team. My comments reflect my experience with my
colleagues in locale. They readily admit they prefer the status quo so
it's not a criticism.
Case in point - we had to move to Git as it's company policy. A lot of
other products took the leap and moved their code to the file system and
learned how to use new tools. That was a non-starter for us as it would
have been disruptive and there was push back. We wrote integration code
to hook git into our existing SCM so it was opaque to the devs. They
don't know they are using Git until they go to Bitbucket to open a pull
request. When I was running training using bash they were moaning about
having to use MS-DOS :)
On 15/2/22 4:43 am, Farley, Peter x23353 wrote:
I have to disagree with you on this point:
"While it's certainly not impossible, it's certainly very difficult to retrain a
HLASM programmer to Java, Python, Javascript etc. It's not because they're not smart
enough, they just don't want to."
Maybe I am an exception (though I tend to doubt it) but I thoroughly enjoy
learning about new technologies, and I have been in the mainframe programming
business since 1968 (at IBM as a co-op student worker in college).
Lately I have been doing quite a lot of python and bash shell programming solving
"challenges" on IBM's zXplore site and having a great time learning a bunch of
new (to me) stuff.
I believe that there are a great deal more folk "out here" that would enjoy learning
"new stuff" if only they were given the opportunity to do so.
YMMV of course, but I wanted to make the point that not ALL "old timers" are technophobes
of the "new stuff".
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of
David Crayford
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2022 3:26 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Holy Moly ...
You make some good points in this post. None of us on this forum are getting
any younger and IBM-MAIN doesn't seem to attract young people who prefer
platforms like Stack Overflow or Slack workspaces. It may be an unpopular
opinion, but it's important to concentrate on millenials now. A large
percentage of developers in my location are in their 60s and close to
retirement. It's not easy to train young people to back-fill as our legacy
products are written in HLASM and require deep technical knowledge of MVS
subsystems. It's optimistic to speculate that it will take 5 years to bring
somebody up to speed when it's probably more like 10. We hope that now we are
all working from home that some of our guys will go on until 70. We are also
modernizing our products and for that we need young guys. While it's certainly
not impossible, it's certainly very difficult to retrain a HLASM programmer to
Java, Python, Javascript etc. It's not because they're not smart enough, they
just don't want to.
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