Posted on 11/29/2016 5:32:51 AM PST by spintreebob
Edited on 11/29/2016 5:48:35 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
I’m on a project right now that is converting a FORTRAN program. :)
I was in a music store here in Louisville when I first moved here and, after talking to another older customer in the store, found out he was in upper management at Humana. When he discovered my history he mentioned that they were considering bringing in some old COBOL programmers to train the younger people in COBOL because they still need it but nobody is learning it.
I had just been hired for another job that week so I declined. In hindsight, I should have looked into it. I have a teaching background as well, and it could have been a great opportunity, I suspect.
Me: “Nope. Well, I’ll be glad to give you a “What’s new in IT” article once a quarter, or something. But you all will need to generate stories, or find people in the company to generate them. Then, you can upload them to the website. People like to see pictures of themselves. And read about awesome work they’ve done. You better get snapping!”
HR: “.......”
I didn’t make any friends in that meeting.
I feel sorry for the husband.
Pretty much.
I have been here 18 years and we have been trying to implement a successful reporting system for non-IT people. We still haven’t been able to do it. The only successful reporting system is the Access databases that I created to talk to Oracle. Literally, a screen with a pile of buttons and a place to enter year and pay period. It looks like a code monkey version of Hoarders.
Crystal Reports comes with Visual Studio, which we get for free. But Nooooooooooo.....
Yes, it is now. RPG life was from 2000 to about 2005. Now I write scripts for a CA product (Windows), and CL stuff to maintain/monitor the systems (IBM/AS400).
There’s a difference between grasping the root-cause of a problem, and the kind of touchy-feely “why do you feel you need to do that” kind of understanding (which is what the OP author was doing).
Not everyone is cut out to be an engineer, or a soldier, or a musician, or a psychotherapist. My wife is a wonderful person, who loves staying home and cooking, and despite trying very hard cannot really “get” information technology. I am great at IT, music, and several other areas, but am terrible at the finance side of business, and have no patience for people who get wrapped around the axle about their emotions.
“considering bringing in some old COBOL programmers to train the younger people in COBOL because they still need it but nobody is learning it.”
All application programming on our mainframe and AS400 is COBOL. If you can imagine this....most of our programmers have white hair :>) Not kidding. surprised?
The author does point out at one point that she tends to ramble and fall into stream-of-consciousness a lot, even when talking with her (apparently long-suffering) boyfriend/husband. Conciseness is not her strong suit (and might be why she’s had trouble with coding).
Ah - there’s the rub. Guessing about requirements. You shouldn’t have to, but life is messy sometimes. First, let me tell you that I’m a Mechanical Engineer. I tell my Electrical Engineer wife that if I can’t see it happening, I consider it “magic”. In other words, I have considerable respect for people who do understand/design “tech”.
Having said that, I wish more developers would realize that I don’t want to bend my will or my actions to fit how a machine wants ME to behave. The best machines/programs work for me, not me for them.
All right, now I’m going to sound like a Xenophobe (to use a term the liberals like to pin on me), but part of the problem with programming nowadays, I sincerely believe, is cultural. As smart as some folks are, if they grew up overseas, they probably don’t understand how I think. Therefore, they will not program the way I’d like to see it on the screen, and will not understand why I don’t want to bow to their thinking and feed the program “just so”...
Again - I totally understand that developers need full requirements, but to the extent that they have to guess, it would be helpful if they thought like the users did.
Pappy - keep doing your magic. I salute you.
Actually, they wanted "something". Didn't know what they wanted. Didn't want to do any work to maintain it once they got it.
I understand, maybe. For instance in their world a site like "Yahoo" always has fresh content on it, they just log in and it all presents itself automatically. They don't need to think about the gremlins working in the background to put all that stuff up on the screen.
I told them that they were going to be the gremlins. They didn't like that. :-)
I think she is close to getting it but ultimately misses the mark. She does not explore the ability to honestly evaluate exactly where you are and what you have in order to determine whether you need to improve or not. Then her comments on being accurate when she worked for the media is a joke.
Uh,...HAHAHAHAHAHA...
Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back.
I would argue that welders and mechanics and those who worked in factories have the base education and logical ability to learn how to code, and learn quickly.
These are intelligent people who had to learn specific skills, but also had to solve problems when something went wrong.
That’s even a better example of developers and users not thinking alike. HR is a very different “culture”. You shouldn’t have to pretend to be HR. You should be told what they want to see, and if you have to guess, you need someone who “speaks HR” to do the guessing. (Please see post 69.)
Raises a great point:
We engineers make _tools_. It’s up to the user to use them.
I've rarely been on the receiving end of reports, or generating them. In infrastructure, I just make sure that they get run.
But, I've seen time and again in meetings - 10 people will argue and argue over the placement of this field, or the inclusion of that one, or the other field got cut off by mistake. Hours are spent generating and fixing the report that, if it gets sent out to those same 10 arguing people, nine of them will ignore it and toss it in the trash.
Yes, great article, if a bit too emotional for my taste.
But the core of what she is saying is so simple.
We are all different. We don’t all think alike, nor would that be desirable.
Value the strengths everyone has that are so different from each other.
It’s really simple. Anyone who has children understands how unique and different we all are as individuals and how innate those differences are. You can see it at an extremely early age.
FORTRAN! Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. We still have PL/1 programs in the Version Control system. We are a Linux shop.
Many young people refuse to spend time on COBOL for fear it might pigeon hole them. That’s why I turned down a high paying job in the 80’s writing TrueBASIC and Quickjob. I am the only surviving COBOL/C programmer and no one even wants to learn it even though our most important batch programs are written in it. I am also the last Oracle Forms developer and our Enterprise system is written in it.
No wonder people are so interested in my physicals.
Precisely
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