John McKown wrote: >Not too surprising to me. I imagine this is the norm for today because a well >educated, intelligent, worker costs a lot more than a preprogrammed drone.
Agreed. >Our profession is rife with people capable of performing procedures they've >been taught, but incapable of thinking through a problem. Here's what we need >to do. They can also put 'Analysis' back in 'System Analyst. I have seen many times those 'PC boffins' can do this at most: 'click a mouse'. It annoys the sh*t out of me just to see them moving the mouse arrow and click here, click there, click again here and there, without the faintest idea what the results of those clicks are supposed to be. They surf from one menu item to the other, from one dialog to the other and eventually give up, promise to come back. Of course, they don't come back because of cluenesses. Mind you, third party products like AbendAid (disclaimer - I don't have it) is a boon, but if you want to analyze abends yourself, please feel free to turn it off to polish up your skills. There in lies the trick. Know when to use an advanced tool to help you (speedy problemsolving) or just try to check out the problem yourself (analysis/careful solving). But using one tool after the other, reading e-books one after the other without grasping the deeper details are in my humble opinion not the time worth. This is where training can come in to help. I believe a well trained person, while being more expensive, can be more productive with or without tools/books. And be able to give a good polished solution. I rather not say anything about the errors [1] inside a spreadsheet program like Excel, which will be missed if you're not extra special careful. Even for that, there are specialised software to help you to spot errors in a spreadsheet. A well trained spreadsheet user will catch those errors without resorting to these tools. I agree with John, it is a sorry state, do you remember the very high-valued IBM-MAIN member who has to close his training business? Why? Costs - back to John's statement. Ok, it was just my rhetorical rant, back to you... Groete / Greetings Elardus Engelbrecht (Where are weekends made? In China, because weekend just don't last that long! ;-D ) [1] - propagating of rounding errors. Mixing of numbers of different magnitude. Iterations done wrong or start at wrong point. etc. Intristic inaccuracy of certain formulas. etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
