RE: The Future

Well said Bryce.

I feel I fall into the pushing the trying to push the envelope but doing what the company wants category. It took five years of advocating for SQL defined tables before it was adopted as a shop standard.

I spend any spare time I get at work trying out new ideas to improve our applications, address a business pain point, or just experiment with a new feature of the operating system or language. I'm currently looking at ways to use the special file functionality to split file I/O from business logic. The end goal being to update our database to a more normalized format that better fits our needs and addresses some of our current limitations.

The biggest hurdle for me is to get management to agree to changes. Some of them are pretty far reaching and getting the time to test everything is the biggest stumbling block.

Bottom line, no matter how much time I spend exploring new functionality, and expanding my skills on the iSeries it is ultimately my management and the business that determines if it gets implemented or not.

I do spend time working on learning other languages, currently c#. There are lots of good free tools to help. Will ever use it in my current position? I doubt it.

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bryce Martin
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 8:12 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: The Future

Holiday Inn Express Dennis, Express! You obviously didn't stay in one last night or you would have known 8-)

Anywho, coming from someone who is not defeated ..... ME, I would tend to agree with John on the most contentious point.... (remember, this is a generalization, there are far more people programming in RPG for non vendor companies than there are for vendor companies). This probably doesn't apply to people programming RPG in a vendor shop, this applies more to those programming in standard shops out in the field. I would agree that most RPGers don't have the mentality of a "software developer"
(each person has their own impression of this term). But I think that this isn't because they "don't care", or as I've seen posted before "lazy". Sometimes that is the case, but that is everywhere with any job.
I think this goes a long way to the fact that most RPGers writing business code are in fact taking Specs and creating programs as management sees fit. This isn't the fault of the programmer, they're doing their job.
Over time however you get worn down by decision makers saying... "No, do it my way!" and after a while they can get so far behind the times that they give up and just try to stick it out until retirement. They are defeated.

Yet others I think are so busy doing their jobs, and possibly really enjoying what they do, seeing people use the programs they made even if they were someone else's idea. The person with the idea(request) couldn't do it, so the programmer gets a sense of satisfaction that they did their part. Eventually at some point they get curious about some new shiny buzz worthy thing and wonder what its all about. They do some research and realize that they don't have the resources in their current job to check it out or learn about it, but realize that it is valuable. This seems to be where Kelly is at.

Look, some people want to come to work, do their job, get their check and go home. They don't want to take work home with them, and don't really care to use a computer at home much since they use one all day long. I would agree that these people don't really fit the "software developer"
architype. In my mind a "software developer" loves technology and wants to do cool new things to make advances in technology itself, not just creating useful things for thier customers. Its about pushing the envelope and a passion for what you do.

The fact that John just flat out suggests that Kelly is "too late to the game" for wanting to learn new programming languages and techniques is short sighted. And telling her to change careers all together, to me, sounds very insulting and disrespectful. Kelly, keep your chin up, once you start learning another language or two you will realize that learning more languages isn't very hard. The syntax from one to another can sometimes be very similar and the same with techniques. In my first 3 years on the job I learned RPGLE, CL(if you consider it a language), HTML/CSS, Javascript, Java, and PHP. Of course, you stay sharpest in the ones you use most, but once you learn the language and complete a fairly significant project with it you'll always remember the nuances you learned and will be able to get back on that bike when needed.


Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I

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