Re: Webfacing out, EGL in

This has also created a shift in what a technical professional needs to be
proficient in... read on...

I have been invited to speak at the local college where they are having a
summer session for high school kids titled "TechNow" and it basically
teaches them how to do some web programming, programming with Alice (
http://www.alice.org/), and some gaming programming in Adobe Flash. It is
really quite the event put on by Peter Johnson (instructor at the college)
and sponsored by area businesses (including IBM). Anyways, I will get to my
point now. Whenever I am asked what IT employers are looking for these
days I always make prominent the fact that you need to be VERY flexible in
learning technologies because many of the big vendors these days don't have
solid long term modernization strategies. This then requires that personnel
rip and replace things every 5 to 9 years which really is a short term
(maybe slightly middle term) timeframe.

Not that it is bad to learn multiple environments (there are obvious
benefits to learning more than one platform/language), but the constant
change in direction creates the need for "specialists in change" vs. being
good at applying business rules to a longer term technical direction.

IBM, concerning the IBM i as it relates to my RPG applications, I want/NEED
modernization strategies that focus on my investment in the RPG/DB2/OS400
programming stack! EGL does not do this as it is yet another pathway to a
supposed platform neautral nirvana. I wish to stay on this machine (and
continue to pay you good money for it because it is a VERY solid platform).

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Shannon ODonnell <
sodonnell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well said Aaron.

It's easy for IBM to say, after 5 years, that they are done with a
technology and it's time for them and now their customers, to move on to
the
next great thing... but in the real world, these projects take months,
even
years sometimes, to get approved (client approves the expenditure for
iSeries hardware and agrees to go with a given technology, such as
WebFacing), launched, developed, tested, installed and get the users
trained.

Then before you know it, you're told by your software/hardware provider
that
it's time to move on to some replacement technology that does not support
what you spent the last 3 years creating and implementing?

That's nuts.

I agree with Aaron's last statement:

"How can we as IBM i professionals make decisions for our organization's
longterm success when IBM is continually stabilizing their different
modernization strategies, and thus only allowing for short-term success?"