Re: Getting Young People into IBM i

On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 3:14 PM Brad Stone <bvstone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

And that's the answer. I wouldn't work with the system had I not gotten my
first internship and used RPG. I actually preferred COBOL back in
college.. haha!

I'm no Brad Stone, but I am another who got their first job with no
experience at a place that trained me in RPG and AS/400 (at the time)
from zero. I literally had never heard of the platform or the language
until seeing their ad in the newspaper. They said they were looking
for anyone with a math or computer science degree, no other must-have
requirements. Before hiring you, they brought you in and gave you what
amounted to a basic aptitude test (mostly math problems). If you did
well enough with that, they figured they could teach you RPG and you
could learn RPG. Most of their applicants had at least *some*
experience in *some* programming language, whether formally educated
in programming or not, and that was generally more than enough to give
you a running start into their training course, during which you were
a paid employee.

John Y.