331–340 of 361 posts
Being called back because nobody can figure out the undocumented hairball you left behind is a vindication?
More like, your plan to ensure endless job security, having appeared to have faltered, was vindicated.
You being vindicated means that someone admits that you should not have been let go; it was a mistake based on misinformation or whatever.
Been working on accounting systems in RPG and COBOL since ~1992. I also know C/X86ASM/Pascal/Delphi/VB/Fortran. Never bothered with C++ that much; played with Java a bit but Oracle irritates my bowels so moved away from that. As mentioned in the article it's good work; but it is also not easy work. You tend to go through cycles of being pushed out to brought back under extreme emergency at any costs to get stuff work…
> Companies never think of the old guys as the ones to implement the new system - that's a job for the "enterprise experts" Exactly this is why rewrites fail. The challenge of a rewrite is not in mapping the core architecture and core use case, it's mapping all the edge cases and covering all the end user needs. You need people intimately familiar with the old system to make sure the new system does all the weird stu…
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"When, exactly, do you think that the X86 surpassed the Mainframe processors, and in what particular way?" Fairly recently. Through things like affordable ssd, enough Moore's law around intel, and better distributed data stores. And better app side knowledge on how to break up a monolith. I was around for a few failed "rewrite this TPF system" attempts and I saw what broke. Commodity stuff can replace it now...but on…
Moore's runs into the laws of physics: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2016/02/24/how-ibm-p... Mainframe DASD is the same as "X86" disks, at least for those using "storage arrays". Pretty much all the smaller Mainframes are gone, many years ago. I've not heard of any successful replacement of a loaded system which used fewer than three times the initial projection of "X86-power". Anyway, time will tell. In 10…
$100 an hour, so $208k a year (assuming no time off), for a guy with 30+ years working on a critical system in an industry where floor traders can make 7-8 figures, and huge bonuses are paid to "analysts". I have plumber buddies that make more than that per hour (and with a crew can make more a year). That's why a couple years ago when I had access to a zseries, and was hearing about how "desperate" the banks were I…
Not sure if the $100/hour figure quoted is a hard and fast cash amount banks strictly adhere to, but ultimately this is business, so: set your price and walk away if it's not met. I set my price: AUD$850/day, with a TINY bit of wriggle room, and that's final. I know my worth (from a skills perspective and market/economical one.)
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> how many bright young junior programmers today could update a lex/yacc parse stream, or handle socket programming or DOS HIMEM? Almost all of them – if they're really "bright" anyways. Even given that a lot of the important context is missing, bright programmers can do this stuff.
that's disingenuous. anyone can do anything given enough to learn the skills. what OP is asking is how many of today's programmers have the skills already. the answer is very few.
Sure, a good programmer can learn this stuff. But they shouldn't have to, not these days. There's far more to programming than any one person could ever learn. Choose your battles.
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And this is the comment that hit the nail on the head Of course Java is going to be slow when the "Enterprise Architect" and his minions will push for hundreds of classes that barely do one thing right and have several inheritance levels deep while the "mainframe" people are shuffling data using something that's simpler than a csv Also, the virtualization magic is good enough so that the COBOL people keep playing wit…
What "virtualization magic" do you mean? You mean taking a program which hasn't been recompiled since 1970 and running it (the 1970 executable) on hardware released in 2014 under an OS from 2015? Of course, it will work. There's no virtualization there, just reality. What 70's technology in particular are you thinking of? The latest Enterprise COBOL compiler is just over a year old.
I worked for years on the modernization of a critical banking infrastructure system. The problems are manifold. The biggest problem is overall architectural impedance mismatch - switching from a batch system (most of those old COBOL mainframe apps are batch systems) to a service-oriented architecture. This makes incremental replacement extremely difficult. But a cutover? On a system that moves more money in a day tha…
At a certain point you reach a point where continuing to try to move elephants around is going to get you no where. Death is a necessary component of change. In fact, renewal could not come without death. Existing legacy systems bring with them assumptions about how things ought to work, and debt about expectations -- expectations that slow down your ability to change away from existing paradigms. True innovation req…
That gets away from the "Flip a switch on billions of dollars of transactions a day" terror.
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> Long lunches, nap in the car, run some errands, etc. Eventually everyone runs out of piss and vinegar. It's not so bad. I hate working with people like that, and would hate myself if I did that.
Life is short, how much of it are you willing to give away. That may not resonate with you now but wait until you're in your 40's or 50's and 10-20 years has passed.
My father in law has a saying: "if you don't like what you do, what are you doing?". And I agree with that.
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Life is short, how much of it are you willing to give away. That may not resonate with you now but wait until you're in your 40's or 50's and 10-20 years has passed.
I like what I do. I like going to work. I like my company. I like coming home to my baby and tickling his feet. It's life . Being a lazy bum not accomplishing what you want to do shortchanges you and your life as well as the people paying you. My father in law has a saying: "if you don't like what you do, what are you doing?". And I agree with that.
You are fortunate. But labeling everyone who "doesn't like what they do" misguided lazy bums is... a bit much.
Most people in this state are slowly recuperating from years of failure while attempting to "do what they like". Usually as a bonus they also have to dig themselves from under a crushing mountain of debt.
As you correctly pointed out - it's life. Though it's rarely as simple as you paint it.