I've long observed that no matter what your employer hired you for, what you turn out to be good at is what they use you for. At one location I was the only one who bothered to figure out what was wrong with the big greenbar printer when it went haywire; before I left, therefore, I was the one folks came to when it misbehaved, and I was the one ordering supplies for it. At another place my boss remarked, during an annual review, that "we gotta get you on some of these team projects; we keep using you as the lone fire-fighter for odd problems, but team projects will look good an your resume". I nodded enthusiastically and agreed aloud, but the fact is I ~liked~ being the guy in the corner who did the odd jobs, figuring out the software that no one else had time for.
I always recommend to young folks that they keep on doing what they're interested in doing. Obviously this doesn't mean neglecting assigned tasks that sound boring; if I don't do what my boss wants me to do then I'm useless to him. But eventually he'll discover that he wants me to do some of the things I'm especially good at too. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. -[Arthur C] Clarke's 2nd law. */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Arthur Fichtl Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2023 04:18 As a now retired freelance z/OS guy based in Munich/Germany I had to find a market niche at my employer. Therefore I specialized on debugging, analysis of dumps and the like. For those tasks HLASM was inevitable. My colleagues preferred more comfortable tasks and languages and therefore I for myself had a quite secure job. And I liked it. My 1st language was the Siemens 4004 Assembler with punch cards as the user interface. Quite funny. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
