[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/27/18 7:53 AM, Kerry Main wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Info-vax <info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com> On Behalf Of Arne Vajhøj
>> via Info-vax
>> Sent: December 23, 2018 9:44 PM
>> To: info-vax at rbnsn.com
>> Cc: Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk>
>> Subject: Re: [Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?
>>
>> On 12/23/2018 9:34 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 12/18/2018 12:28 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>>>> On 12/17/2018 2:49 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>>>   So, what happened
>>>>> to all of those COBOL, Fortran and Pascal jobs?
>>>>
>>>> I can tell you what happened to some of the people.
>>>>
>>>> Upon seeing and hearing all the negative things about VMS, some
>>>> figured the ship was sinking, or would sink, and decided to bail out.
>>>> They moved to WEENDOZE, or Unix, or whatever they thought would last
>>>> for a while.
>>>>
>>>> It wasn't in many cases that their jobs were actually going away,
>>>> it's that they drank the kool aid and believed the jobs would go
>>>> away, and wanted to move on before things got critical.
>>>>
>>>> I'm guessing that things didn't get so critical, but, those people
>>>> were gone, and if they'd go, then most surely would not come back.
>>>> So, then you had the "it's hard to find people to work on VMS".
>>>>
>>>> This is a classic example of self fulfilling prophecy.
>>>>
>>>> Funny thing is, some most likely would have finished their working
>>>> years on VMS, if they hadn't left.
>>>
>>> I actually agree with you.
>>>
>>> Way too many companies jump ship way too soon ending up doing multiple
>>> migrations because they picked the wrong technology when they were in
>>> a hurry.
>>>
>>> And if people switched just for job security, then they may very well
>>> got disappointed. The new stuff often disappeared faster than the old
>>> stuff.
>>
>> Legacy vs new stuff:
>>
>> https://dilbert.com/strip/2017-02-23
>>
>> :-)
>>
>> Arne
> 
> My favourite on this topic:
> 
> <http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Jurassic-Programmers->
> "It hadn't always been that way. About six months earlier, the dinosaurs occupied the nicer offices. They were responsible for maintaining -- some, originally building -- InsuraCorp's 25-year-old cash-cow product. Though it worked very well, the system ran on the VMS operating system and was written in the now-forgotten Digital Interactive Business Oriented Language (DIBOL), rendering it accessible only through a text-based terminal emulator. In the age of the Web, and competitors with a more modern product, customers demanded more.
> 
> InsuraCorp vowed to hire a new team of sharp-minded programmers to completely rewrite the software as a Windows application using VisualBasic.NET. This was the project Russ was brought on for, albeit several months late. With years of Windows and .NET-based development experience, Russ would be a great fit for the rock stars. However, he had some background in COBOL, so his manager wanted him to "spend some time" with the dinosaurs."
> 
> Read link to see how this all turned out ..
> 
> 😊

Cute story, but they miss-spelled MVS.  :-)

bill