RE: Time to get serious

I agree this is a tough situation.  But at the same time, there are tons
of good RPG programmers out there, they just tend to not work for entry
position money, and I think that's your problem.  You want RPG
programmers at entry-level prices, and those are few and far between.

But there's a reason for that.  When you hire an RPG programmer, you
typically get someone who is not only conversant in a very productive
language, but they also tend to understand business.  Sure, you can hire
someone from college for a relatively low salary, but you get what you
pay for.

Which leads to a related point: there's a whole generation of
"programmers" being turned out of school these days that really doesn't
know anything about programming.  They can push buttons and run wizards,
but they couldn't tell you why (NOT (A AND B)) is the same as (NOT A OR
NOT B).  

So what to do?  Well, one thing you can do is to leverage your assets.
Start working towards a deployment model that can make use of both
old-style RPG programmers and entry-level programmers using things like
Java.  What you want is a tiered architecture in which the Java guys
build the UI and the RPG guys build servers to encapsulate the business
logic.  Designed correctly, such an architecture lets you take advantage
of both sides to do lots of work.

Joe


> From: Mike Eovino
> 
> I'm a manager (don't hold it against me) in a shop that's growing
> fairly quickly.  It is extremely difficult to get the RPG talent we
> need.  Schools are not teaching the language, so it's tough to find
> the young talent we'd like to build our base on.  It's tough to find
> experienced programmers because the ones you want are already in good
> jobs they don't want to leave.
> 
> We're teaching it to everyone we can, but I'm worried that we won't be
> able to attract enough talent to keep growing at the rate we'd like.
> What can we do?