RE: Time to get serious

> From: Mike Eovino
> 
> I don't know where you got that idea, because I certainly did not say
> that.  I will clarify what I DID say.

Sorry about that, Mike.  I got the idea because you said "young guys".


> 2.  We want young guys who can come in and learn from these pros,
> learn the business and be our workhorses for the long haul.

So why can't they learn RPG as well?  Any programmer worth his salt can
learn RPG. 

> But I'm on a 30 year time horizon here.  That's why I want the young
> guys as well.  I want to build this business for the long haul.

Okay, then you are willing to train the new guys.  Again, you can teach
someone RPG.  Now, if they're not WILLING to learn RPG, then maybe
they're not cut out for your job.  And frankly, there are a lot of
people coming out of school who have pretty sharply defined skill sets,
and not a lot of ability to expand.  That's the problem with CS courses
today: they don't teach how to program, they teach how to use specific
programming tools.

> That's what I'm looking for.  But as we build a critical mass of Java
> programmers and our RPG programmers retire off, what do we do?  If we
> reach a tipping point where we no longer have and no longer can
> acquire competency in RPG, what do I do?

First, you need to decide whether RPG is going to be around in 30 years
or not.  You seem to swing back and forth on that one.  Let's assume,
though, that RPG is around for 30 years.  Given that time horizon, you
should have been able to hire quite a few generations of new hires (in a
shop as stable as yours, I consider a generation to be about three
years).

Let's further assume you have a multi-modal shop, with both Java and RPG
skills required.  You hire the new guys into the Java side, but provide
incentives to graduate to the RPG side.  In effect, set up your Java
programming side as the minor leagues.  If these new hires are coming
out of today's college curricula, then it's actually not a bad analogy,
since they're likely to be pretty deficient in basic programming
knowledge.

So train them and cross-promote them.

Now, five or seven years down the road one of two things will happen:

1. RPG continues to grow and the iSeries (in whatever incarnation it is
by then) continues to be the vigorous platform it's been for decades.
You'll now have a clear advantage in that your business is running on
the best architectural model and you'll likely be able to adapt to
changing business rules faster than someone with a brittle object
hierarchy. (Heck, if your core business practices permit it, you've now
got some pretty high-talent staff that you can farm out for extra
bucks.)

2. You see signs that RPG is waning, but you've built a multi-modal
shop.  You can start performing a knowledge transfer from the RPG staff
to the Java guys and start writing platform independent business logic,
using SQL and stored procedures and business objects.  Because you have
the Java guys in-house and some of them have at least touched RPG, the
knowledge transfer will be much easier.  Your senior RPG guys will be
retiring, and your second-tier guys move in business analysis roles.
The entry-level guys by definition are cross-language, since they
started in Java, so they are ready to go.

That's just my outlook, Mike.  It may be a little simplistic, but I
think this is the direction I'd try to go.

Joe