[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/17/2018 2:49 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 12/17/18 2:41 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.)
>>
>> Oh, absolutely.  I once applied for a job as an 8051 programmer to 
>> find out
>> that it was a telephone support job.  That's the only time I have ever 
>> walked
>> out of an interview.
> 
> And, all this talk of COBOL and Fortran (and yes, Pascal!) has
> brought yet another thought to my head.  We still hear about
> all the VMS systems out there in the wild (although, apparently,
> the owners still can't reveal their existence) am I the only
> one who remembers that VMS systems were most often programmed
> in COBOL, Fortran and Pascal (and, at one time also Ada but as
> a language that kinda faded even before VMS).  So, what happened
> to all of those COBOL, Fortran and Pascal jobs?

I think it depends a lot on what "all" in "all the VMS systems
out there in the wild" means numerically.

If it means hundreds of thousands of systems, then it is
another insane theory.

If it mean some hundreds of systems, then it could very well
be true. Difficult to know.

And those systems would likely run stuff written in the old
languages.

But it does not mean anything for the general job market.

Let us say that there are 1000 of those systems. And let us
say an average of 1 developer per system (some will have
way more, some will have one developer support many systems, some
will not have nay developer because the system run
some old commercial app). And let us say that people
stay around in the same job for 10 years (that is pretty high
for the IT industry, but I expect VMS developers to change
job a bit less than average). That means 100 jobs ads per year
or 8 jobs ads per month. That is noise in the IT job market.

Arne