[Info-vax] IBM Layoffs (quite a bit off topic)

[dodecahedron99 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, January 29, 2015 at 6:30:31 AM UTC+11, Tail Waggert wrote:
> On 2015-01-28, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> > Re: need for education
> >
<...snip...>
> 
> You're missing the point badly. Colleges are not trade schools. You're
> supposed to learn how to think in college. When you get out you're ready to
> start thinking about being good at something.
> 
> The good people get that way over decades, not over a few semesters.

+1

Industry has influenced higher education to churn out cheap student widgets for their consumption and have pushed the cost of training back onto the students who have superfluous qualifications coupled with huge debts. Those qualifications have become a commodity to the point where their education value is dropping like a stone

I'm sure some will flame this following comment but I think Philosophy is a great skill to learn and one that should be taught at all levels of schooling, along with the basics, Maths, Science, English etc. For those not versed in Philosophy it's ultimately 'thinking how to think'. It's got nothing to do with people sitting around a table discussing the existence of their belly-lint as it's often portrayed. All the sciences originally derived from philosophy but they have each followed the descriptive aspect where-as philosophy is tied more to normative fundamentals. So IMO, Philosophy is still very much needed

In my opinion, a company, like society should have a certain percentage of various people's in it's makeup. The thinkers, the go-getters, the cautious, the planners, the managers, the workers, the ..., you get the point. The percentages of each should vary with the market segment the company operates in and change according to how the market changes and/or where the company wishes to head to
Seems companies are stacked full of overly qualified people and people skilled in areas they don't actually need or the flip side is that the qualifications people have are of such low quality that they may as well not have them

I worked many a year in a large IT company that eventually outsourced it's own departments to it's Indian arm and consequently I was marched out the door. No attempt to redistribute my skills elsewhere in the company because their only measure of an employee's worth was the dollar

Until someone / some organisation can put a dollar value on things like character, integrity, ability to learn and be flexible, thinking outside the square, inventiveness, cross-application of knowledge and other life skills that framework the technical skills like knowing a programming language then companies will continue to burn human capital. Until this happens it's a race to the bottom and the cheapest wins it seems, at great cost to society overall - but that's a topic for debate outside of this thread I guess

Wasn't like only 10 years ago (I can't be bothered looking it up) that IBM had another great downturn and layed off 1000's of workers? Something is fundamentally wrong with our organizations if we continually follow the central bank boom/bust generated cycles. I personally believe the days of exponential growth are over and the world is starting to learn to adjust to sustainability at all levels going forward, and this would include educating people to the returnable value of any qualification obtained. 
You don't hear much about TOC (total cost of ownership) anymore. It was something the VMS camp used to push until the world went 'linux is free' mad

And to keep this post semi-tied to this whole group thread, in terms of sustainability, then the VMS manager needs to go by way of the dodo, the same as the VMS operator role went many years ago.
Where I work, automation is in full swing. Removing people where-ever possible is the name of the game.

The value of a VMS systems manager was once that they were a one stop shop for enterprise computing best practices, storage, networking, software development and DB admin and tying together business needs with how to get the best out of that VMS eco-system the company purchased. That roles almost doesn't exist anymore except in specialty shops it seems or tied to applications that will not die or are awaiting their linux replacement

VMS now stands as a fish out of water in the environment I am in where the above mentioned segments are broken up and managed separately and where VMS doesn't play nice because it was designed in an era when all these things were unified under a single OS
The real value in having VMS in an organisation was in the quality of the system manager employed because they had to be across the board on all aspects of IT

Can VMS make the transition to the modern world? I hope so, it still has a lot of potential but I wonder if the entrenched folk in existing VMS lands are prepared to really drive VMS to where it needs to be or whether they want to stick with what they know to see out their careers? Are they willing to be educated too? (harsh words I know but I'm pointing the finger at myself when I say this)

What education are we investing in VMS? Are we rehashing what worked yester-year or are we educating VMS about the modern world and going to create a platform that is plug and play with the services out there that people want?

As usual, Hoff's posts are tied to the real world. He made a very good point about mobile almost coming from nowhere overnight and not to discount another major change wave happening going forward. Is VMS in the state to take hold of a future change wave? I don't think so :-(

To my mind, VMS needs to be infinitely distributable, infinitely secure, infinitely scalable up and down, infinitely easy to integrate with, child's play to manage because if one projects forward what people want it's for IT to become like electricity, you turn on the switch and there it is

Seems like VMS needs a lot of educating and like a well educated person, it takes a community to really educate someone, versus a paper qualified person churned out by a single institution...

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On Thursday, January 29, 2015 at 11:21:31 AM UTC+11, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2015-01-29 00:03:00 +0000, johnson.eric at gmail.com said:
> 
<...snip...>

> 
> I was pondering OOBASIC would look like, just the other day.  Parts are 
> certainly doable, at least for something akin to blocks and dispatch 
> queues (closures), for objects and automatic reference counting (GC), 
> and also dynamic typing.   Some form of interators and generics would 
> likely fit, too.  Bringing back the interpreter and a JIT would be 
> feasible, too.  Not really sure that FP would work or fit all that well 
> within the existing BASIC language environment and expectations, though.
> 
> > To be fair, no language covers all of those topics completely. Many things
> > are entwined, and there are of course tradeoffs between what a language
> > chooses to emphasize and what it chooses to hide. But I'm just not sure
> > I see a language like DEC Basic offering a unique voice on those topics.
> 
> OOBASIC would be much further past DEC BASIC than DEC BASIC was past 
> BASIC-Plus 2.
> 
> Now the chances of OOBASIC having a market, or being worth the 
> investment?  Probably zilch.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

ooBasic

Didn't IBM cerate OOCobol a number of years ago?

hmmm, I just Googled it, seems more than a few years ago...

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27001516&aid=1

My bet is still with Python as a DCL replacement though. The number of libraries that porting Python fully to VMS would open up to me makes the investment worthwhile. Other DCL replacements would be the functional languages like Erland or perhaps Haskell? Python can be written functionally as well but it's not 100% native to the language. Python's own community is rigorous about code writing and keeping the code easy to understand for maintenance purposes and it's pep documents enforce this too. I think as a DCL replacement, Python would be very good.But it will open up a can or worms and things like lower case support will need to be addressed throughout VMS - ouch