We veterans have spent a lot of time and energy trying to convince
newcomers of the truth in your reply and it's been a long, slow road.
It's my opinion that we (the WDSC community as a whole) have set
expectations too high -- unrealistically high.
Interesting. I teach people how to use WDSC and in one day they're
productive. I wonder what's different about my approach and yours, Buck.
Good question! Maybe it's the audience -- people who aren't being paid
to learn some new thingy while given time off of 'real work' to absorb
the lessons. Or maybe it's the assumption that 'in one day they're
productive' means something different from what I've been saying. I may
not have been saying it very well, let me try again.
The perception that PDM users have about WDSC is that is it too much
work for too little additional benefit. That's what my fellow employees
tell me and that's what we've seen posted here on this list.
Oh gz. If you can't learn Ctrl-F5 you need a new job.
The key here is to listen to the newcomers and not dismiss their
concerns. Ctrl-F5 is just one of many things they'll have to remember
in their first week.
This is another expectation that is unrealistic. What does 'more
productive' really mean?
More productive means an easy way to see everywhere a field is used and jump
from one place to another. An easy way to expand am externally described
data structure or a file. Gz, Buck.
How much more productive? Sure, use the outline view to follow a field
around and don't forget to manually refresh that view after editing
or...? How much more productive is it to use right-click, Show fields
than F15/split? Especially when you can't copy/paste from the list of
fields in WDSC and have to open the DDS anyway?
I got where I am from simpler tools first. I'm experiencing some degree
of frustration and I'm an avid user: I can't imagine how newcomers are
dealing with it. I feel more productive than when I use SEU/PDM, but I
don't feel say, twice as productive. Who knows what those words mean,
really?
WDSC offers me more real estate than SEU, so I can easily copy a hundred
lines of code and paste them multiple times (heaven forbid) in multiple
open source members if I want to.
If this is the only benefit you can see from more real estate, then you are
missing the point.
No, that 'and' was meant to imply 'and another benefit WDSC offers.' I
rather like more real estate because I can see more of my code and keep
whole functions on the screen instead of parts of functions. How'm I
doing? <grin>
I've already switched, for a decade now. My challenge to you is to
convince the newcomers that switching from PDM to WDSC is hard to
justify. Can you recall a post from a newcomer that went like this:
'Just tried WDSC. Loaded quickly and ran flawlessly. Does everything I
need and I'll never use PDM or SEU again!'? I can't.
Yes I do, Buck. Every time I teach my class, that's what 9 out of 10 people
say. They love it.
Cool! I can't recall a post here on this list saying that. Can you?
> They say they'll use SEYU occasionally for quick
things, but they love WDSC.
Yep, I hear the same thing, but when I walk by I still see SEU. People
WANT to be more productive. People WANT to use new stuff. People WANT
to be cool, current and happy. We on this list see people trickle in,
trying WDSC - they WANT to try it, they ARE trying it, but it's not
meeting their expectations.
How can we as a community help them? That's a serious question, not a
cynical blow-off.
I'm going to try to 'market' WDSC to the folks here at work again, only
this time I'm going to try to set expectations a little lower. The
culture shock of moving to a GUI is apparently bad enough that the
adoption rate is just too low. I'll be positioning WDSC as a little
better than SEU, and for the obvious (i.e. anyone can see it when they
look!) screen real estate and coloured tokens (look -- no more stealth
comments!)
Why don't you pay someone to actually teach the product, Buck? Maybe it's
your positioning, not the product.
Maybe it is my positioning; I'm open to that suggestion, which is why
I'm not going to try to sell WDSC as a Spectacular Phenomenon That Will
Blow You Away!!!!
Maybe I ought to set up a repository using Package Manager and install
WDSC on everybody's machine for them. Maybe I ought to write a check
and pay a teacher to come in and maybe I ought to pay everybody a week's
vacation so they can take the time to focus on WDSC and not worry about
work.
I can't really afford that, but if I could, what would that cost me in
roundy numbers? Figure a burden rate of $125 an hour and 7 people and
don't forget the opportunity costs. So 40 hours * 7 people * $250 an
hour comes to $70000 plus the cost of the teacher's fee, lodging, meals,
travel, maybe $5000?. Let's say $75000 as the cost of getting taught WDSC.
I can't speak to the productivity gain... it seems smallish to me, but I
haven't the experience you have teaching it. I'm just an informal, if
avid proselyte. Can you give me a roundy sort of number for the ROI;
when will my investment in my fellow employees get paid down?
Of course, you don't mean that I personally ought to pay these costs,
but the boss tends to ask bossy questions when you ask him to spend
$75000 and a week of staff time to learn a tool that does (what he
feels) is pretty much the same as PDM and SEU.
This is what I mean when I say that nobody knows what 'productivity'
means. If I can see a full function on the screen, I might make fewer
mistakes, meaning fewer bugs to catch. Colour coded tokens might help
me pick out fields from operation codes, fewer bugs, etc.
But how much more productive, in the end, is almost completely the
subjective view of each individual programmer. And the 'how much' is
greatly influenced by the initial expectations she had when trying WDSC
in the first place.
--buck
midrange.com
