[Info-vax] VSI employee retirements

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/1/2023 8:21 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
> As far as I know or can remember (and I was never an insider), the head
> count traditionally went up during a port to a new architecture and was
> reduced afterwards, and we are now in a situation of a new port that has
> been recently completed for some definition of completed.

I would distinguish between port and enhancement as:

port - the effort to bring everything running on current VMS Itanium and
        not declared dead (never to be ported) to run on VMS x86-64

enhancement - add stuff to VMS x86-64 that does not currently run
               on VMS Itanium (could in some cases be backported but
               I would not keep my breath on that)

The port is close to done, but they are missing some pieces most notable
the compilers!

>                                                           Of course the
> port traditionally finished within a year or three of starting and was
> never called a production release until it had been built with native
> compilers.  So, we're in unprecedented territory, and it's hard to know
> what staff reductions mean.  I expect we'll find out eventually.

The smaller staff longer time for this port compared to previous
ports *should* mean less reason to downsize engineering.

Also more enhancement work is waiting than with previous ports, because
enhancements need to catch up 15-20 years or so. That again *should*
mean less reason to downsize engineering.

I am aware that mr. *should* is pretty unreliable.  :-)

Arne