On 1/8/2014 9:05 AM, Govind Chettiar wrote:
It's pretty creativity-stifling to work in a company where the threat of being fired looms. If one works for a firm that has annual RIFs just as a matter of practice and one is constantly in fear of setting a foot wrong lest one get on that list, then one is not going to do anything more than the bare minimum. No one wants to work a single extra minute in that kind of environment. Absent such a fear, one is more willing to take risks, be innovative.
I worked for an ISV that had a very relaxed environment, and if you finished your work on time, could experiment. They were victims of their own success, getting bought out by a larger company. Their policies required an annual review, and the lowest scoring individual in each group was fired. One year that was the maintainer of their top selling product.
But even without RIFs, some environments can be stifling. The staff in some government installations seems to fall into two categories - those who are capable and learn how to avoid pitfalls of rules, and those with marginal skills. As a case in point, I did some contract work at one agency that required all jobs using tapes to contain JCL comments listing, by data set name, all volumes to be mounted, in sequence, with precise formatting requirements. They had a command that would show the volumes for a data set, but the user still had to edit each job almost every run. I suspect that they had this process as long as they had TSO; after a while I got sick and tired of this, and wrote an EDIT macro that did the necessary work. Sometimes a fresh look is helpful.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
