Re: Reverse Performance Review

Dan 

There are some details I cannot go into due to confidentiality & to keep me 
out of any more trouble.
The company I work for is going through a period of financial belt tightening 
imposed by the competitive and changing nature of our global market.
This means that a lot of stuff I took for granted in the past is now being 
slashed.
Also, I have aquired some bad habits that I need to work on reversing.

Glenn Ericson asked a question & I figured it was partially for group 
discussion to indicate what programmers think we need in general that we do 
not have that would help us be better employees & partially inspired by my 
original posting at a time that I was extremely frustrated & hurt, and now 
that I finally have a copy of the review, I am going through this again 
because I am seeing some words that I did not see the first time.  There are 
several things that I would like that I think would to help with my 
productivity & sense of appreciation.

Like at my review a year ago I said in all seriousness that I would like to 
have my own parking spot, you know with my name on a plaque saying that is my 
spot, that I would be willing to trade a small like 1% reduction in pay raise 
to not have the hassle every day of whose parking spot to be invading, or 
park around where it is too dark to see my car when I leave at night, and 
step in a few puddles on the way there.  Management thought this was a big 
joke ... for a short time there was a crayon sign with my parking place - it 
did not last.  This "joke" was rather annoying to me, but I did get a raise 
last year, and performance ratings that were a reasonable facimile of my 
self-perception, which took that sting away.

Usually I park in the loading dock because it is convenient to the back door 
& if they ask me to move my car I hand them my car keys, knowing that when 
they get done with whatever they need the loading dock for, they usually move 
my car back into it.

I selected one example in my post for reply to Glenn's question.  There are 
several things I would like to have that I think would translate into 
improved productivity for myself & my employer.  One of them is to wean me 
off of twinax & have me serve the users from a PC.  I believe this would 
accomplish a multitude of benefits.

Back in the late 1990's when we left S/36 5360 to AS/436 I told them that it 
would benefit the company if I could be weaned off diskettes.  At the time we 
had an inventory of approx 3,500 8" diskettes & growing rapidly.  Although I 
have not been entirely happy with tape technology, by comparison to 
diskettes, I do not regret that reccommendation that they followed.

While it is true that TAATOOLS & ROBOT & other things have been on my wish 
list for many many years, there was the time 5 years or so ago when I was 
told there was a limited budget for upgrades & they wanted to know what was 
the one thing on my list that in my opinion was best for the overall company 
productivity.  I said hands down enough extra memory for cache so end users 
would not have to suffer interactive degradation.  We got the memory.  Thanks 
to sizing questionairre we also got a faster processor.

The world of technical information has dramatically changed in a few years.
I can no longer get a printed IBM reference manual for anything I need to 
work with.
Some of them IBM does not publish anymore except on the internet.
A few weeks ago after a lot of struggles, we got an IBM redbook downloaded & 
printed at a local print shop & into a binder - if my boss had realized what 
we were doing sooner he might have stopped the expense.  I told him in 
advance what I was doing, but he did not hear me ... part of the problem with 
my inability to communicate effectively.

When I was at IBM school, we had the manuals on the internet on one session & 
the programming work we were doing on another session so any time something 
came up that we were the least bit unfamiliar with, or needed to check finer 
points of keywords, the internet connection to latest IBM manuals had the 
answers.  I wish I had that reality at present but I don't.

On this list & others, I have made contacts which have provided shareware 
programs which are solutions to many of our problems, but how do I get 
internet download or e-mail into my source code?  Transcription is a severe 
bottleneck.  We have instructions from various people how to do stuff, but I 
have to work with PC guys who are even more busy than I, so it is do this 
when your time permits which could be months, by which time I have forgotten 
why I wanted that.

Right now I do all my e-mail & participation on AS400 network & e-commerce & 
computer-security & etc. lists from my home PC - some of my interest is 
personal & the entertainment value of helping other people, but a lot of the 
discussions I would not be in were it not for the need for continuing 
education that is current job related ... but even if I had PC connection at 
the office I have my doubts if it makes sense to change that ... I can see 
people being harrassed for excess voice messages on their phones & disk space 
for e-mails, so I would be more comfortable continuing to have several Gig on 
my home PC to search out what I need to help me with my work, then forward to 
the office only what needs to be cut & pasted into the 400.

Should I work an hour less at the office because I spent an hour on 
continuing education from home?  Well the boss's work style & profession is 
such that he does not see the value of this to me, then if I do less than 8 
hours at the office then I might be perceived as being a slacker.

Some day I am going to sign up for the IBM performance tracking & I will do 
that from my home PC.   But right at the moment I am a bit too busy with 
other things.  I suspect this will add to our limited disk space, so 
currently my focus is to clean out some problems that are consuming more disk 
space than neccessary.  I also need to start Security Auditing to see if it 
is safe to do certain upgrades & I am sure that will also eat some disk space.

I have been researching some Security Wizard issues, leading to adjustments 
in some System Values - I go to the security sites from my home PC, then look 
up the documentation on what that means & compare to what values we now have 
& think through the implications ... result is that some of IBM 
reccommendations get implemented but not all of them & also thanks to 
discussions here, we also do some security upgrades that are not on IBM 
suggestion list.

I am now age 57 & I have noticed that there is a lot of age descrimination in 
the world & I am now at a company that does not practice it quite as much as 
other places ... they recently persuaded the retirement of two co-workers.  
One was 64 & the other was 75.  Both had cut down their hours so they were 
working 3 day weeks and were suggesting further cut down.  I am at the point 
with stress that I am taking a vacation day every other week.  I no longer 
care how many vacation days I have available ... I am too wiped.

I was working 75-80 hour weeks during the 1998 conversion, then in summer of 
1999 we discovered by accident on BPCS_L that BPCS 405 CD Rel-2 had a bunch 
of Y2K fixes in it.  We had decided in 1998 that we did not need what Rel-2 
had to offer, but now panic city getting those fixes installed ... If my 
memory is correct, there were 3,000 fixes that were date related & I 
installed 95% of them in 4 months, then another crisis came along whose 
resolution was more important than getting Y2K compliant.  And I was glad of 
it, it got me out from under a nightmare.

When I was younger I could work 16+ hour days in a 6 day week during a 
conversion & also come in for 10 hours on the 7th day & keep going for weeks 
so long as the stress was minimal.  I know darn well I cannot perform like 
that today.

I need to be able to serve the needs of both PC users & twinax users.
Without having much access to PC attached to 400, I am not experienced in 
their unique needs, so I cannot help their productivity by much.

Currently our users are about 2/3 PC users & 1/3 twinax.
In 1998 when we did our Y2K repair conversion the ratio was about 1/3 PC 
users & 2/3 twinax.
At that time I suggested that it would be constructive if I had PC access to 
project management tools & that this access be arranged in ample time for me 
to learn how to use such tools, so they ended up giving me access to a 
co-worker PC, in which it was also convenient for me to access internet to 
look up IBM manuals like when the 400 backup was running to check out fine 
points associated with current activity, but that ended in 1999.
Until the PC access was taken away from me, I was happy with this arrangement 
because the company investment in PC connection was such that twinax users 
had faster 400 performance than PC users, but that gap is closing.

Until our Y2K conversion, I was exclusively a S/36 programmer & I considered 
myself to be a jedi master there, or close to it.  I am getting better at 400 
stuff but consider my 400 skills to be barely above average today.  My skill 
set on 400 is in RPG/400 not IV ILE because the package we are managing is 
written in RPG/400, and I have managed to forget a lot of S/36 stuff & what 
came before.  

I feel I really need to get better at programming related to what I am now 
managing before I expand my skill set to figuring out how to do serious 
enhancements using state-of-art language stuff & quite possibly the job needs 
really are evolving where they want my knowlege of how the system works, 
communicated better to end users whose knowlege is not as thorough as mine, 
rather than spending a lot of time improving it.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)


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