Good point Peter, Many of ‘us’ enjoy learning new everything but keeping the wheels on the bus and day to day stuff keep us busy 50 hours per day. Learning time is very limited. Cheers
. On Feb 14, 2022, at 16:17, David Crayford <dcrayf...@gmail.com> wrote: It depends on the team. My comments reflect my experience with my colleagues in locale. They readily admit they prefer the status quo so it's not a criticism. Case in point - we had to move to Git as it's company policy. A lot of other products took the leap and moved their code to the file system and learned how to use new tools. That was a non-starter for us as it would have been disruptive and there was push back. We wrote integration code to hook git into our existing SCM so it was opaque to the devs. They don't know they are using Git until they go to Bitbucket to open a pull request. When I was running training using bash they were moaning about having to use MS-DOS :) On 15/2/22 4:43 am, Farley, Peter x23353 wrote: > I have to disagree with you on this point: > > "While it's certainly not impossible, it's certainly very difficult to > retrain a HLASM programmer to Java, Python, Javascript etc. It's not because > they're not smart enough, they just don't want to." > > Maybe I am an exception (though I tend to doubt it) but I thoroughly enjoy > learning about new technologies, and I have been in the mainframe programming > business since 1968 (at IBM as a co-op student worker in college). > > Lately I have been doing quite a lot of python and bash shell programming > solving "challenges" on IBM's zXplore site and having a great time learning a > bunch of new (to me) stuff. > > I believe that there are a great deal more folk "out here" that would enjoy > learning "new stuff" if only they were given the opportunity to do so. > > YMMV of course, but I wanted to make the point that not ALL "old timers" are > technophobes of the "new stuff". > > Peter > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of > David Crayford > Sent: Monday, February 14, 2022 3:26 PM > To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU > Subject: Re: Holy Moly ... > > You make some good points in this post. None of us on this forum are getting > any younger and IBM-MAIN doesn't seem to attract young people who prefer > platforms like Stack Overflow or Slack workspaces. It may be an unpopular > opinion, but it's important to concentrate on millenials now. A large > percentage of developers in my location are in their 60s and close to > retirement. It's not easy to train young people to back-fill as our legacy > products are written in HLASM and require deep technical knowledge of MVS > subsystems. It's optimistic to speculate that it will take 5 years to bring > somebody up to speed when it's probably more like 10. We hope that now we are > all working from home that some of our guys will go on until 70. We are also > modernizing our products and for that we need young guys. While it's > certainly not impossible, it's certainly very difficult to retrain a HLASM > programmer to Java, Python, Javascript etc. It's not because they're not > smart enough, they just don't want to. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
