On Sat, Sep 3, 2016 at 1:57 PM, Farley, Peter x23353 <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Frank,
>
> <Rant>
> I can't help but respond to you on this. I have personally encountered
> this exact attitude with respect to advanced SORT capabilities ("Who
> besides you can maintain this next year?") and I find it so short-sighted
> as to be detrimental to any business organization's survival.
>
> If a senior technician can use freely available software documentation to
> figure out how to efficiently solve a business need, then that technique
> can be taught to less experienced programmers who may be called upon to
> maintain the control input at a later date. We are talking about fairly
> simple control syntax here which is very well documented, including
> flowcharts of the processes (thank you DFSORT documentation team). It is
> far from being rocket science.
>
> IMHO the failure here is a management failure to support the concept of
> keeping the less experienced members of the technical team trained up to
> the ever-changing landscape of the tools of our trade. Rather than invest
> in continuing technical education, they would rather hire barely trained
> apprentice programmers and pay them the lowest possible wages, and insist
> that all coding that solves business problems must be done to the lowest
> possible standard so that apprentices can understand. This aids the
> payment of their bonuses this year by keeping payroll to the bare minimum,
> and does nothing else to promote the long-term success of the business.
> </Rant>
>
> As you can probably tell, this is a sore subject with me.
>
Me too. And I encounter it from my boss. You may think "ok, that's
normal". My boss is a ex-CA developer who worked on CA-7 & CA-11 back when
they were UCCEL products. He is a _good_ programmer. But he still takes
this attitude of "make it so that a normal COBOL programmer would have a
chance to understand it" (my original comment wasn't as nice and targeted a
different programming demographic). And, yes, I know that there are some
very good COBOL programmers on this list. I'm talking about the people who
spell it "cobal". Heaven forfend should I use any UNIX facilities, except
for my personal "ad hoc" use.
>
> Peter
>
--
Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it
once. -- Karl Lehenbauer
Unicode: http://xkcd.com/1726/
Maranatha! <><
John McKown
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