On Apr 13, 2015, at 4:16 PM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
In <[email protected]>, on 04/13/2015
at 09:33 AM, Tony Thigpen <[email protected]> said:
Ed must work for the government, or a union shop. No place I ever
worked would have allowed such programmers to continue to be
employed.
I've seen them in commercial, educational and government shops, but Ed
failed to address two significant questions:
1. What percentage is like that?
2. Is the percentage any higher for applications than for systems.
--
We had our fair share of application ninnies. We also had some very
sharp programmers that were at the top of the food chain so to speak.
We never heard out of the sharp ones till we upgraded to a 168MP and
all of a sudden their online system stopped working well. Their code
didn't allow for an update of a wait between instructions. We had the
listing all over the console and were stepping through it and some
systems guy chimed in you have to change it to a CS instruction as
there is a timing issue. We had to hand them a POPS so they could
read about the new instruction (this was in the 70's). Once we handed
them we never heard from them again. Of the other two groups we had
been invaded by a consulting company of questionable morality (The
came in one sunday and IPL'd one of the machines and tried to hide it
(I will explain if you request)) I had caught them and almost got
them booted out of the door but alas they had us by the proverbial
short hairs so upper management had to look the other way. The less
than bright programmer I was talking about worked for our company
(not the consulting company) and was less than average. As to hard
numbers it varied so much as the consultants had their fingers I will
guess 20 programmers in one group and that broke down to some pretty
sad programmers to 2 or 3) The other group had about 10 and they were
just that typical programmer types just average.
As to systems people we were lean and held the number down to a bare
minimum say 10 although we did get an additional body (dead weight)
as the personnel manager loaded us up with her son over several
objections. We had 1 deadweight 1 who thought he ran the place which
was a surprise to his boss.
2 extremely bright IBM types and SE and a PSR both were full time.
All in all we were a lean group. All our MVS people were maybe 6.
This was for several MVS machines (168MP 3033 etc)
We had some old DOS people around but it had been phased out several
years ago and they went with them. We also had a sysprog working in
Amsterdam but as soon as we put them online as RJE user he came back
and left the company after being gone for 2 or so years.
We went for 7070 to 7090 to 360 to 370 SVS and then MVS in a short
amount of time. We had been written up as star IBM user of 7070
(Before my time) .
Ed
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
