Re: Reverse Performance Review

57 is not old.  We took a guy in his upper 50's, sent him off to buku
Domino schooling and he ate several manuals on web design and whatnot.  He
designed our entire web site at
http://www.dekko.com
He comes in early and leaves every day at 3:30 and spends time with his
wife who recently retired due to Parkinson's disease.  This fella was with
a subsidiary we purchased for over 14? years.  And prior to the purchase
dabbled in some dos based programs for barcoding and whatnot.  Real go
getter.  Yet real nice and soft spoken.  And at the company party when we
played 'Who wants to be a Millionaire', he was everyone's call a friend.

Two youngest developers are sons of another coworker.  One had experience
with COBOL.  The other was a Mechanical Engineer who dabbled a little in
programming and wanted to get mainly into programming.  Working out great.

Violate the status quo.  You'll have more fun.


Rob Berendt

==================
Remember the Cole!


                                                                                
                                         
                    MacWheel99@aol.com                                          
                                         
                    Sent by:                   To:     MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com  
                                         
                    owner-midrange-l@mi        cc:                              
                                         
                    drange.com                 Subject:     Re: Reverse 
Performance Review                               
                                                                                
                                         
                                                                                
                                         
                    04/10/01 02:28 PM                                           
                                         
                    Please respond to                                           
                                         
                    MIDRANGE-L                                                  
                                         
                                                                                
                                         
                                                                                
                                         




Dan

There are some details I cannot go into due to confidentiality & to keep me
out of any more trouble.
The company I work for is going through a period of financial belt
tightening
imposed by the competitive and changing nature of our global market.
This means that a lot of stuff I took for granted in the past is now being
slashed.
Also, I have aquired some bad habits that I need to work on reversing.

Glenn Ericson asked a question & I figured it was partially for group
discussion to indicate what programmers think we need in general that we do
not have that would help us be better employees & partially inspired by my
original posting at a time that I was extremely frustrated & hurt, and now
that I finally have a copy of the review, I am going through this again
because I am seeing some words that I did not see the first time.  There
are
several things that I would like that I think would to help with my
productivity & sense of appreciation.

Like at my review a year ago I said in all seriousness that I would like to
have my own parking spot, you know with my name on a plaque saying that is
my
spot, that I would be willing to trade a small like 1% reduction in pay
raise
to not have the hassle every day of whose parking spot to be invading, or
park around where it is too dark to see my car when I leave at night, and
step in a few puddles on the way there.  Management thought this was a big
joke ... for a short time there was a crayon sign with my parking place -
it
did not last.  This "joke" was rather annoying to me, but I did get a raise
last year, and performance ratings that were a reasonable facimile of my
self-perception, which took that sting away.

Usually I park in the loading dock because it is convenient to the back
door
& if they ask me to move my car I hand them my car keys, knowing that when
they get done with whatever they need the loading dock for, they usually
move
my car back into it.

I selected one example in my post for reply to Glenn's question.  There are
several things I would like to have that I think would translate into
improved productivity for myself & my employer.  One of them is to wean me
off of twinax & have me serve the users from a PC.  I believe this would
accomplish a multitude of benefits.

Back in the late 1990's when we left S/36 5360 to AS/436 I told them that
it
would benefit the company if I could be weaned off diskettes.  At the time
we
had an inventory of approx 3,500 8" diskettes & growing rapidly.  Although
I
have not been entirely happy with tape technology, by comparison to
diskettes, I do not regret that reccommendation that they followed.

While it is true that TAATOOLS & ROBOT & other things have been on my wish
list for many many years, there was the time 5 years or so ago when I was
told there was a limited budget for upgrades & they wanted to know what was
the one thing on my list that in my opinion was best for the overall
company
productivity.  I said hands down enough extra memory for cache so end users
would not have to suffer interactive degradation.  We got the memory.
Thanks
to sizing questionairre we also got a faster processor.

The world of technical information has dramatically changed in a few years.
I can no longer get a printed IBM reference manual for anything I need to
work with.
Some of them IBM does not publish anymore except on the internet.
A few weeks ago after a lot of struggles, we got an IBM redbook downloaded
&
printed at a local print shop & into a binder - if my boss had realized
what
we were doing sooner he might have stopped the expense.  I told him in
advance what I was doing, but he did not hear me ... part of the problem
with
my inability to communicate effectively.

When I was at IBM school, we had the manuals on the internet on one session
&
the programming work we were doing on another session so any time something
came up that we were the least bit unfamiliar with, or needed to check
finer
points of keywords, the internet connection to latest IBM manuals had the
answers.  I wish I had that reality at present but I don't.

On this list & others, I have made contacts which have provided shareware
programs which are solutions to many of our problems, but how do I get
internet download or e-mail into my source code?  Transcription is a severe
bottleneck.  We have instructions from various people how to do stuff, but
I
have to work with PC guys who are even more busy than I, so it is do this
when your time permits which could be months, by which time I have
forgotten
why I wanted that.

Right now I do all my e-mail & participation on AS400 network & e-commerce
&
computer-security & etc. lists from my home PC - some of my interest is
personal & the entertainment value of helping other people, but a lot of
the
discussions I would not be in were it not for the need for continuing
education that is current job related ... but even if I had PC connection
at
the office I have my doubts if it makes sense to change that ... I can see
people being harrassed for excess voice messages on their phones & disk
space
for e-mails, so I would be more comfortable continuing to have several Gig
on
my home PC to search out what I need to help me with my work, then forward
to
the office only what needs to be cut & pasted into the 400.

Should I work an hour less at the office because I spent an hour on
continuing education from home?  Well the boss's work style & profession is
such that he does not see the value of this to me, then if I do less than 8
hours at the office then I might be perceived as being a slacker.

Some day I am going to sign up for the IBM performance tracking & I will do
that from my home PC.   But right at the moment I am a bit too busy with
other things.  I suspect this will add to our limited disk space, so
currently my focus is to clean out some problems that are consuming more
disk
space than neccessary.  I also need to start Security Auditing to see if it
is safe to do certain upgrades & I am sure that will also eat some disk
space.

I have been researching some Security Wizard issues, leading to adjustments
in some System Values - I go to the security sites from my home PC, then
look
up the documentation on what that means & compare to what values we now
have
& think through the implications ... result is that some of IBM
reccommendations get implemented but not all of them & also thanks to
discussions here, we also do some security upgrades that are not on IBM
suggestion list.

I am now age 57 & I have noticed that there is a lot of age descrimination
in
the world & I am now at a company that does not practice it quite as much
as
other places ... they recently persuaded the retirement of two co-workers.
One was 64 & the other was 75.  Both had cut down their hours so they were
working 3 day weeks and were suggesting further cut down.  I am at the
point
with stress that I am taking a vacation day every other week.  I no longer
care how many vacation days I have available ... I am too wiped.

I was working 75-80 hour weeks during the 1998 conversion, then in summer
of
1999 we discovered by accident on BPCS_L that BPCS 405 CD Rel-2 had a bunch
of Y2K fixes in it.  We had decided in 1998 that we did not need what Rel-2
had to offer, but now panic city getting those fixes installed ... If my
memory is correct, there were 3,000 fixes that were date related & I
installed 95% of them in 4 months, then another crisis came along whose
resolution was more important than getting Y2K compliant.  And I was glad
of
it, it got me out from under a nightmare.

When I was younger I could work 16+ hour days in a 6 day week during a
conversion & also come in for 10 hours on the 7th day & keep going for
weeks
so long as the stress was minimal.  I know darn well I cannot perform like
that today.

I need to be able to serve the needs of both PC users & twinax users.
Without having much access to PC attached to 400, I am not experienced in
their unique needs, so I cannot help their productivity by much.

Currently our users are about 2/3 PC users & 1/3 twinax.
In 1998 when we did our Y2K repair conversion the ratio was about 1/3 PC
users & 2/3 twinax.
At that time I suggested that it would be constructive if I had PC access
to
project management tools & that this access be arranged in ample time for
me
to learn how to use such tools, so they ended up giving me access to a
co-worker PC, in which it was also convenient for me to access internet to
look up IBM manuals like when the 400 backup was running to check out fine
points associated with current activity, but that ended in 1999.
Until the PC access was taken away from me, I was happy with this
arrangement
because the company investment in PC connection was such that twinax users
had faster 400 performance than PC users, but that gap is closing.

Until our Y2K conversion, I was exclusively a S/36 programmer & I
considered
myself to be a jedi master there, or close to it.  I am getting better at
400
stuff but consider my 400 skills to be barely above average today.  My
skill
set on 400 is in RPG/400 not IV ILE because the package we are managing is
written in RPG/400, and I have managed to forget a lot of S/36 stuff & what
came before.

I feel I really need to get better at programming related to what I am now
managing before I expand my skill set to figuring out how to do serious
enhancements using state-of-art language stuff & quite possibly the job
needs
really are evolving where they want my knowlege of how the system works,
communicated better to end users whose knowlege is not as thorough as mine,
rather than spending a lot of time improving it.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)


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