[Info-vax] Hiring maintainers for legacy VMS systems

[Simon Clubley]

On 2014-09-12, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Jojimbo wrote:
>> Do you really care about finding your replacement?  If you are open
>> about your plans and management doesn't make appropriate staffing
>> adjustments that's not your problem.  To retire means you don't work
>> there anymore. You have no responsibility to that corporation
>> anymore. Walk out the door and don't look back, time is now yours to
>> use as you see fit.
>> 
>> Regards. Jim.
>
> While your suggestion appears logical, I would suggest that there are 
> various levels of "feeling responsible" that different people have. 
> It's a bit like "owning responsibility to see needful things happen" vs 
> "I'm here for the paycheck".
>

As my job will almost certainly (>95-99% sure) not exist in a few
months and hence I will be looking for new employment (probably
non-VMS given the VMS market position) these are issues I am giving
a great deal of thought to recently.

Jim's attitude is something I find it hard to imagine ever doing myself;
for me, duty and responsibility are the words which keep coming to mind.
I find it hard to imagine a situation in which I would ever leave any
half-decent employer in the lurch.

And just to head this off, my job disappearing is nothing to do with
VMS as such. The company I work for was owned by a really, really, decent
person who was also a great technical guy; the kind of person you could
have long detailed technical debates with and who was a very long time
DEC user (right from something called CTS-300 (or maybe CTS-500) through
to the current VMS setup).

However, times change and people retire. The new owners are decent
enough people but they are not technical people, and this combined
with the fact they are using industry standard packages in their
other operations means it's not viable for them to continue with
an in-house development setup at this one company they have just
acquired. This is something I can totally understand.

However, to come back on topic, I also know I feel a strong sense of
duty and responsibility to help them move the existing data into their
setup assuming they go that route. If I found a job, I could never
just give them the minimum notice period and just walk away. That goes
contrary to everything which I believe.

> While I personally have much more respect for the former practice, I 
> will admit it's a 2-way street, and while some companies value the 
> former, others act in ways that justify the latter.

I hope I never find myself in the latter situation. :-)

Simon.

PS: The above was a bit longer than I anticipated, but like I said,
I have been giving this a lot of thought recently. :-)

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world