Justin--
About 20 years ago the company I worked for was on the verge of the
PC revolution. The sales department was loading up on PCs, complete
with "Client Access" cards to hook into our Twinax terminal system.
And we, in IT, were in charge of making them work on the AS/400.
And we, in IT, didn't have PCs. The head of the IT department
couldn't see the advantage of PCs. So to support their PCs, we had
to chase them off and use their PCs as guinea pigs as we learned the
most efficient way to configure them and get them running.
About that time a local users group had a Famous Pundit in to talk.
One of his examples went like this-- You need tools to do your job.
To see what you need, take a bunch of toys-- blocks, weebles, and
things like that. Stuff them in your toilet bowl with as much TP as
you can unroll. Then flush.
As the bowl fills up and overflows, call your plumber. While he's
looking over the situation, snickering, sneak out and look in the
back of his truck. He's probably got 10-20,000 dollars of tools.
And, you, as an IT geek, barely have a pencil!
The moral is that if you don't have the $10-20,000 in tools, whether
you own them or not, you aren't going to be able to do a good job.
The pundit's suggestion was if you really want become proficient you
need to own your own tools.
It was shortly after that that I invested in a decently configured PC
for home use. And I played with it and learned enough to be
dangerous.
The moral is that if your employer won't provide the tools, you'll
have to invest in them yourself.
Computer languages are all alike-- you can read records, update
them, and write them back to a file. Yes, I know the SQL people have
renamed fields, records, files, and libraries as columns, rows,
tables, and schemas, but learning another computer language is
'simply' learning how to say "Read a Record" in the new language.
And learning another language is not as difficult as learning to
parlez Francais!
--Paul E Musselman
PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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At 5:29 PM +0000 10/24/16, Justin Taylor wrote:
I've got about 3 decades until retirement, so just treading water is
not an option (even if I could stomach the thought).
midrange.com
