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

ncsmith@gate.net writes:

> They won't pay you (or treat you like the professional you are), 
> but they will be happy to pay the two people it takes to replace you.

True story ... when I left Willis Music in Cincinnati, they had to
1. Hire THREE people to replace me.
2. Take some applications off the system.
3. Get a hardware upgrade.

One of the triggers that drove me out of there ... COMMON was in Cincinnati 
one year ... I knew years in advance that it would be there ... I requested & 
got approval for vacation time concurrent with COMMON ... I had every 
intention of attending & paying to attend out of my own pocket ... then at 
the last minute along came one of the usual totally avoidable idiotic 
emergencies that forced them to delay my vacation  ... they thought they were 
being very gracious in offering me an extra day paid vacation to delay what I 
had been looking forward to for several years ... I did not get to go to 
COMMON & a few months later I gave them my notice.

Management had an emergency meeting, authorizing just about anything to keep 
me, including matching & raising above the salary of the place I was leaving 
for (we're talking a 25% raise here) but I just had to get out of there, I 
had had enough of being "hey you" with no willingness to accept my input to 
sensible upgrades to improve performance ... like memory to make swapping 
unneccessary ... we were on an IBM S/34 in which currently running programs 
in aggregate typically needed 10 times as much memory as the system had 
available.

A year later when I visited them for a few hours, they still had TWO people 
doing what used to be my job, and those applications were still off the 
system.

I had offered to help them out with some stuff for a 1/2 day on a visit to 
Cincinnati for reasons other than seeing them, provided I got a check for $ X 
before I started, because I knew from past experience with them that they 
were slow to pay all sorts of bills, but they forgot to have it ready, so I 
sat down in the lobby & said I would start when I was paid to start & various 
people asked questions & I waved my hands ... no I don't want to hear this 
because you don't want to pay me ... I think they broke all records in 
cutting a check.

They showed me this program that had been giving top management conniptions, 
and that they had had several PAs sweating over, and even shown it to outside 
consultants & no one could find the bug ... I said to give me a copy of the 
compile & I would take it with me to study & see what I could find.  I found 
the problem in one day & ROFL - the boss PA was a very hard nose on certain 
programming techniques, insisting on blank-after output because it saved 
compile byte size vs. safety checking each file input for invalid reads & the 
scenario was a conditional read of a file not processed in every cycle, not 
cleared for the irrelevant cycles, but with the mentality of everyone 
marching to the blank-after mantra, they would never see it, so I wrote 
saying that one line would fix the problem & I would tell them what it was in 
exchange for $250.00.  I was expecting them to haggle me down, but apparently 
my attitude was more than they were willing to deal with.

This is known as burning bridges but I had taken so much hell from that 
place's management over the years that I needed my self-esteem back in any 
future dealings.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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