[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/17/18 10:07 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>
>> In the case of Fortran, how much of the Fortran development is done by
>> dedicated programmers, and how much is done by people (say researchers
>> and cheap/free labour otherwise known as students) who do the development
>> as part of a larger research project ?
> 
> Many years ago, we had fortran programmers who would sit down with an
> engineer and the two of them would work together to produce code.
> 
> But now in the New Age, engineers all write their own code.  So yes,
> although we have a couple dedicated programmers, we have only a couple
> of them compared with a couple thousand engineers writing fortran and
> matlab.  And those couple dedicated programmers spend their time fixing
> stuff that engineers broke.
> 
> My belief is that productivity has gone down as a result, and certainly
> code efficiency has gone down, but management does not see this.
> 
>> In the case of Fortran especially, the latter type of usage is not going
>> to show up on the job boards as "Help! Fortran programmer wanted!".
> 
> It might be mentioned in the job description, but then again it might not
> be.

And, to demo even more how this method is of very little value,
how many jobs list Fortran and Pascal in the vacancy announcement
because it's just boilerplate and the guy in HR who actually wrote
the announcement hasn't a clue what is really needed or even what
a programmer is.  (Yes, I can point out ads listing COBOL, Fortran
and other languages where the actual work is installing PC's and
printers.)

bill