RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

["Jim Damato" <jdamato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I started my career at a place that grew their own RPG programmers.
They hired kids straight out of college, screened them with a logic
test, and gave them a couple weeks on the ATS training tapes.  Of course
they had a staff of 20-40 seasoned veterans with one to three years
experience.  Also it was back in the days of the System 38 and the
fill-in-the-blanks programming of RPG III.

You probably can't really do this in a shop with one or two iSeries
programmers.  I suppose that's the point though.  How is their staffing
going to change under the new platform?  You can't find RPG programmers,
but there's a steady supply of Windows or Unix admins, DBA's, SQL
developers, and Java programmers.  How many diverse skill sets are you
going to have to find to replace a couple of RPG programmers?

-Jim


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+jdamato=dollargeneral.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+jdamato=dollargeneral.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Raby, Steve
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 8:47 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

Actually just had a chat with the boss and he is full of praise for the
iSeries, one of the reasons he/they are thinking about it is that he
cannot get decent RPG programmers. "It is very difficult" he was saying
"and all the ones we get are like you, grey haired, all the younger ones
are going for Java and the like."

So what is the answer? I don't know.

Steve