On 4/23/2014 8:56 AM, Sankaranarayanan, Vignesh wrote:
Are we supposed to magically grow skills when it's known that there's a massive
competency gap?
I think I digress ...
In the sixties I was a competent ForTran and assembler (FAP and MAP)
programmer on the 700/7000 series, with experience on several plotters;
the company I worked for put me on a government contract to convert a
sizable 7094 plot package to 360 assembler. My first ASM/F assembly had
6000 lines of errors. I gained experience from reading the manuals,
testing, followed by going back to manuals ( with AHA! moments), etc.
The company also had a policy of tasking employees not currently on a
contract to nurse the system (DOS to start with, PCP, then MFT II
later), which is how I got hooked on systems work. While IBM provided
(expensive) training courses, they were never as good as real-life
experience.
Nowadays companies need to assess applicant skills, but are not willing
to pay for (third party?) testing, even though it would save them money.
A small ISV I did consulting work for exemplifies this - their flagship
package kept bombing - two programmers they hired for upgrades had
inserted things like MVC byte,C'A', instead of MVI or =C'A'.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, Vermont
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
