I was looking for some information online tonight and came across this piece
I'd written about 5 or 6 years ago. I'd actually forgotten about it until I
saw it again, but I think it speaks fairly well to this question of Is RPG
Dying or "the RPG Problem".
This was written just moments before (in an allegorical sense) the push came
to code in PHP, Python, EGL (Joe P.!), ActionScript or a variety of other
web/mobile centric languages. Despite that, I think (IMHO) that is speaks
very well to what at least part of the problem is to we iSeries programmers.
The original link is here:
http://www.mcpressonline.com/analysis/commentary/imho-where-have-all-the-job
s-gone.html but I'll include the body of the piece here also since it's not
that long.
IMHO: Where have all the Jobs Gone?
Anyone remember the 1990s? That 10-year period should have been called the
"Decade of the AS/400 Programmer" as it was the only time in the history of
computer programming that the programmer was truly in the driver's seat in
terms of when, where, and for how much they would work. The AS/400 was a
new, exciting system that small, medium, and large businesses were
frantically investing in, and the RPG and COBOL programmers could pretty
much write their own ticket. Anyone with a little bit of S/38 experience
became a programming god, and companies were willing to pay out huge salary
increases and enormous sign-on bonuses to attract the best and the brightest
in the industry. With the impending doom to our economy of Y2K, forecast by
everyone from Time magazine to President Clinton, a sense of urgency
permeated our entire global culture and, again, the AS/400 programmer was
the wizard who held the secrets to the magic spells that would see the
corporate world through the coming storm.
Then what happened? Y2K passed with a whimper instead of a bang, a country
was torn apart by a presidential election that wouldn't stop, and our hearts
were broken by the numbing horror of 911. This was followed by recession, a
war in Afghanistan, rising fuel costs, and an economy that had decided it
was time to sleep. AS/400 programmers found that they were no longer in
demand as much as they used to be, and the jobs began to disappear. Added to
that was the insane rampage to jump on the Java bandwagon and, in the
process, dump anything perceived as legacy, as if becoming platform-agnostic
and getting rid of systems that had been working fine for years for the
dubious benefit of being able to use a Web browser would make up for
corporate America's years and years of poor business decisions. Things began
to look bad for the AS/400 programmer.
Then what happened? Wall Street discovered that Enron and WorldCom execs
were overstating profits while racing to their multi-million dollar mansions
built on the retirement funds and salaries of their employees and the
investments of their stockholders. At the same time, Arthur Andersen, whose
business it was to keep the corporate giants honest, was too busy to stay
honest themselves because they were seeing how much they too could steal
from the working man. America took another shot to the chin, and our faith
in our economy stumbled again.
On the IT front, Java was still riding the crest of maniacal popularity,
even though only about a quarter of the entire programming population could
program effectively in it, and the AS/400 began an identity crisis that has
not yet ended, starting with IBM changing the name of the system to iSeries.
IBM, taking the shotgun approach to marketing, said, "You want Java? We can
give you Java! You like Linux? We can do Linux on the iSeries. You want
WebSphere? We have 30 different flavors of it on our iSeries! You want
browser-based access to your apps? We can give you that too! Domino? We have
it! Microsoft? Run it inside our iSeries! We are insane! We will do
anything! AH HA HA HA!" Corporate America's response was a resounding, "Nah.
The AS/400 is dead. We're going to keep reading our management journals and
do whatever they say instead."
Then what happened? America took on a new war in Iraq, and suddenly our best
and brightest were being sent into battle instead of into college. The
rising cost of fuel began to have a direct effect on the failing American
economy, and businesses were forced to consolidate, downsizing and
instituting layoffs by the tens of thousands. Corporate America looked
around for ways to cut costs, and a third-world nation raised its head and
said, "Send us your jobs! Let our people write your code for pennies on the
dollar!" And corporate America listened and sent those RPG, COBOL, and Java
programming jobs to India. Meanwhile, the AS/400 professional, who had been
doing a terrific job as a programmer, now found herself greeting shoppers at
Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, IBM felt pressured to lose the AS/400's "legacy" image, so they
enabled it to do so much at the same time that the AS/400 began to get the
reputation as the Swiss Army knife of computing platforms. Interesting on an
intellectual level maybe, but who has the time or money to keep changing
their business culture every few months to run on an increasingly expensive
and schizophrenic system? At the same time, the Wintel world was gleefully
pointing out that a PC server cost only a few thousand dollars while the
iSeries was several orders of magnitude more expensive, so why in the world
would your business want to throw money away when our economy was so bad?
Added to that was the knowledge that third-graders were being taught to
program in Visual Basic, and suddenly seasoned programming professionals
found themselves competing for their jobs against pimple-faced kids not yet
old enough to buy beer.
Then what happened? Our nightly news told horror stories of our heroes in
Iraq being killed, not by a dedicated enemy fighting for an ideal, but by
anonymous and uncaring roadside bombs, and our nation wept. The President
told us it was all over, but the dying kept on. Mother Nature decided that
she'd had enough and threw several tantrums at our southern shores to try to
shake us out of our lethargy, but that only served to highlight our
incredible ineptness at responding to domestic disasters, and it shined a
light on our inability to look beyond class or skin color, and again, our
economy took a shot to the eye. And IBM, feeling that this time they had the
solution that would turn it all around, renamed the system once again, this
time from iSeries to i5.
But then a funny thing happened. Despite everything-despite the wars and the
rising cost of fuel, despite the worst that nature could throw at us, and
despite an idiotic and useless name change to the AS/400 platform-the
American economy began to rebound. Slowly, profits started to climb, and
slowly, jobs began to reappear. As business started to regain its footing, a
need for programmers began to grow, and the AS/400 programmer began to
believe that maybe things were finally turning around.
Then what happened? What happened is that everything that has happened
during the last six years to our economy and our industry has come back to
haunt the AS/400 programmer. By this time, there are so many dedicated
AS/400 programmers out of work that a single job listing on Dice or Monster
nets hundreds of resumes. Suddenly, it is no longer a buyer's market. It is
now a seller's. Headhunters can pick and choose, and if you don't know Java
or .NET or have not worked on J.D. Edwards or Synon for the last five years,
you don't have a chance in hell of finding a job that will pay you enough to
keep that house you bought when times were good. And the cost of fuel
continues to rise, while at the same time programmers are forced to search
farther and farther away for gainful employment.
So where have all the jobs gone? For the AS/400 RPG and COBOL programmer,
the answer is to that question is simple: Your jobs have gone to India, or
they've turned into Visual Basic and Java programming positions, or those
that remain are held by AS/400 programmers who understand that they have to
fight tooth and nail to hang on to what they currently have. And that leaves
the rest of us out in the cold, living on retirement funds, giving serious
consideration to those late-night truck-driver-training-school commercials,
and wondering if IBM will ever spend any time, money, and effort to promote
RPG and COBOL, the backbone languages of the AS/400 system-and incidentally,
corporate America-and hoping that corporate America will wake up in time to
realize that if it keeps sending all of our jobs overseas, soon there won't
be anyone left in this country able buy their products and keep them in
business. And the AS/400 programmers sit and stare and shake their heads.
And now what will happen?
Shannon O'Donnell is a freelance writer who specializes on the iSeries. He
can be reached at sodonnell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
midrange.com
