Re: The "greying of Common" Is it still true?

I'd agree with this statement and go one step further, part of the problem
is with the professors at our universities.  I know that there are some
colleges with great AS/400 programs but our local college and professors are
pushing kids away from midrange systems to the more hyped NT market.  Our
university has a very serious problem in their MIS/IT departments, the
people teaching in those departments have no experience outside of the
classroom!  Most of them are products of the very university where they now
teach and I can tell you from experience that they don't know their !##$#
from a hole in the ground!  But these "professionals" are telling their
students that RPG and COBOL are dead along with the AS/400 and mainframes.
Most of those same teachers are teaching courses that they don't understand
and they are filling their students with ridiculous non-truths.  I can
remember when I was still in college, only about six years ago (I still go
back from time to time to pick up something extra), I had one particularly
lousy teacher who unfortunately taught (if you could call it that) RPG.  He
was still teaching RPGII!  He couldn't make the most simple programs work so
he would give everybody A's to keep from having to actually do anything
about it!  His favorite line was, "Don't worry about not being able to get
your programs to work.  When you get your degree, your going to go to work
at some big company and they will send you to school to learn what they want
you to know."  Well, his statement may or may not be true, but it is hard to
get a job in this area right out of college because everybody around here
knows what kind of grads the local university turns out!  Thanks a lot ASU!
I hope that other schools aren't this bad.

By the way, everybody in our shop is under 40 except for our PC guy, go
figure!  I'm the youngest at 29.

73,

Jack Mullins
Sun Ergoline
P.O. Box 2026
Jonesboro, AR 72402
http://www.sunergoline.com
jackm@sundash.com
870.935.1130 x 109



At 01:05 PM 04/01/2000 -0600, you wrote:
> >So, my question:  Has the situation changed? Are there young people
> >in your shop? Is the AS/400 going the way of the Shaker villages?
>
>
>We just had a local user group meeting in Minneapolis where Skip
>Marcasasni spoke on SQL and there were several younger people
>there. There was a lot of thirty-something people as well.

What IBM has needs to do, and has failed to do IMHO, is convince college
faculties and then students that after they learn after they learn those
crazy CL commands, the byproduct will be to automatically execute the
MAKEMONEY command.

Al






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