This is called the monkey syndrome. It happens from the lowest lever in IT to the highest level in U.S. business. Just take a look at the monkeys running Bear Sterns, Bank of America, General Motors, and the list just keeps on going. So, we're doing nothing but breeding monkeys, trying to make every job a monkey job, then wondering why there are few good jobs around. This only ensures that jobs are held by monkeys or they go overseas, where monkeys are in plentiful supply. Have you ever wondered what that TV commercial is all about when it talks about CA software is designed to improve customer service. What?! Try calling Bank of America or any other bank or large company. We get on the phone system from hell, where getting off is our only rational alternative. Customer service is nothing more than an expendable expense. :-) PHB's are only half the monkey equation. Twenty-five year old monkeys are the other problem. God help us! :-o Bill ______________________________________________________________________
From: JPB-U2UG <[email protected]> Sent: 4/18/2009 3:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [U2] UV to SAP migration disaster I can't speak for everyone but if it's anything like at our place, it's due to lack of education. UniVerse is contains all of our business logic and Microsoft is used for our presentation layer, desktop and web. We have 3 programmers working on UniVerse with an average age of 55. In our windows area we have 10 programmers with an average age of 25. Most of the people coming out of the colleges and universities only know one platform Microsoft. They are taught nothing about processing data, database structure, proper logic, or problem solving. They are not even being taught Unix anymore. I think the colleges are doing their students a disservice because most businesses are still running other platforms for their business logic and only have windows as the presentation layer. This causes a problem because when the business wants to hire someone they don't have anything except these 90 day wonders to choose from. The candidate has problems because they have never been taught how to use anything other than the windows tools. This isn't exclusive to U2, it's a problem with any of the proprietary operating systems/products and anything on Unix/Linux. This gives the PHB's the mistaken impression that anything not windows is obsolete and they should scrap what they have and go towards all MS or anything else that looks pretty. The new programmers are more than happy to get on board with the idea because most of them want to be working in what they are taught. They don't know what business logic is and they think it would be a walk in the park to switch. After all they were able to build that web page, right? They, of course, forget that the data had to be there before they could present it. The PHB's find that there is a bigger pool of willing low cost employees to choose from and force all of their people that actually know the business logic off the payroll. Then the nail is in the coffin. The new programmers all of a sudden discover that there is something happening in the background that they were not aware of, they try to reproduce it but nothing seems to work the same as it use to. Pride takes over and nobody wants to admit that they may have made a mistake. They don't notify the PHB's that there is a problem, they start panicking, they don't want to rehire the employees they got rid of, so they hire some consultants that don't know the business logic any more than the people that are there. It's not the consultants fault they were expecting that someone at the company knew something about how the company operates. By the time all of the problems come to light the company is on the brink of bankruptcy. Where does the blame go, the people that left were at fault for not giving the youngsters all of the information they needed. -------------------------------------------------- From: "Rex Gozar" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 4:38 PM To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [U2] UV to SAP migration disaster I've been wondering why the Shane Co. felt the need to migrate away from UV. * Was their IT staff unable to meet business requirements due to the limitations of UV? * Was their IT staff to blame, rather than the UV database environment? (i.e. understaffed, lack of skills, etc.) At any rate, it appears that either (or both) caused Shane Co. management to look for a different solution. Under the assumption "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" I would think that management thought something was broken, and they needed to spend money to fix it. Does anyone have any first-hand knowledge of the specifics? Anyone care to share their insights? rex John Hester wrote: There were a few posts back in January about Denver jewelry retailer Shane Co. and their disastrous migration from UV to SAP. Today they're starring in an eWeek slideshow about I.T. disasters: ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
