Re: Death of the AS/400 (was Death of the RPG Programmer, List Ac tivity)

Montana in a reasonably sized city probably has wonderful climate & standard 
of living ... the reality is that your management probably is not competent 
at the task of finding RPG programmers & wants the work done on a platform in 
which they are competent at finding relevant staff ... suitability of the 
platform irrelevant to the task, or they have some other reason that they 
will not share with you.

I periodically get bombarded with cold calls from some consultants with 
people allegedly soon coming off some programming project & needing new ones 
... the phraseology is sufficiently similar each time that I suspect their 
management has no imagination.  Several of the trade press forums have posts 
from RPG programmers offering to work for free ... I do not know what their 
motives are ... if they are semi-retired & bored ... the federal government 
has some rules about how much retirees are allowed to earn - some deal to 
crowd old folks out of the job market ... or if they are recent RPG graduates 
who do not know where to look for a real job.

I got my current job many years ago somewhat by accident.  I was looking for 
a programmer job & someone pointed out that in some industries they use the 
name "Data Processing Manager" to do the same job that in another industry is 
called "System Operator" the only difference being that it pays more, so I 
was looking at some ads that I had overlooked earlier & noticed that Central 
had the same ad for a month in a newspaper of a 2 bit town with a tiny 
population & did not have that ad in the decent sized cities around there, so 
on a hunch I sent in my resume.

Apparently HR departments sometimes do not realize that they need to 
advertise professional technical openings to a larger population base than 
run of the mill ordinary jobs.  I have had several co-workers attend computer 
science classes at local junior colleges, that included AS/400 RPG & from the 
questions they putting to me it was obvious the classes were very rudimentary 
suitable only for preparing beginner RPG programmers.  Someone is taking 
those classes.

Do you know about PIE?  Some companies seem interested in supporting more 
AS/400 talent pool out there & perhaps one of IBM's press releases lists some 
of the schools that are turning out these folks.  The economy fluctuates - 
good in some parts of the country & bad in others ... once upon a time there 
was a company in Boston offering fancy car as gift to induce new staff ... I 
would only be interested if I could live in Montana & telecommute & they pay 
my long distance bills.

> Subj:  RE: Death of the AS/400 (was Death of the RPG Programmer, List Ac 
> tivity)
>  From:    Smildenber@Washcorp.com (Scott Mildenberger)
>  
>  This is interesting because our management says they are trying to hire 
> RPG programmers and can't find any.  

>  In fact, there are several projects that
>  they are considering doing on another platform because they are scared they
>  won't be able to find RPG skills although we have told them that we can 
take
>  someone with programming experience and teach them RPG. 
 
>  Your message makes
>  me wonder whether we really can't find any RPG talent or if they aren't
>  looking very hard in order to use it as an excuse to move away from the
>  AS/400 or maybe nobody wants to live in Montana.  Just wondering.....
>  
>  Scott Mildenberger

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

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