RE: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

[Michael Jacobsen <MJacobsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

That's not entirely true.  I see no reason why you can't hire a capable 
graduate to learn RPG in a small shop.

When I graduated college 2 years ago, I got a job as a RPG programmer. 
Never even heard or seen RPG before and the closest I've came would have 
been a course on logic using COBOL.

Sat through hours of ATS training tapes learning RPG III and database 
administration then learned RPG IV primarily on my own and from looking at 
code we already have.  We are a shop of 3 programmers.

Of course, now I'm moving on and I don't care if my next job is with RPG 
or not (preferably not) because I work in a shop that is resistant to 
change (as far as RPG goes, anyway).  But that's another discussion, and 
one that has been beaten to death on this list.

-Mike


midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 06/30/2006 10:30:14 AM:

> 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