My interview for my first full-time job, at a big Savings and Loan in
1979 (after the HR interview) with my to-be boss Les went like this:
he picked up a thick post-bound continuous-form listing, opened it to
a random spot, pointed to an assembler instruction and asked "what
does this do?" Did that 2 more times and his 4th question was "how
much money do you want?"
That place was a zoo. Two weeks later Les quit. His boss calls all
of the workgroup into his office, points to Les and says "now here we
have a rat deserting a sinking ship." He was half-right. It was a
sinking ship. I gave it 3 years but it survived 6 years. Oh, and a
few months later that manager was fired.
BTW, I don't remember too well now, 44 years later, but I think most
of the application code was in assembler. CICS macro-level was
brand-new and we hadn't started using it yet, and under the covers, it
was still assembler. Sort of.
In those days, the Federal government tightly controlled account
types, terms, interest rates, everything. One day the company got
authorization for a new account type. A few days later we get a call
that the new account type wasn't broken out separately on some
report. A group of us assembler programmers managed to find the
source. In DYL250, which none of us knew although I had a vague
awareness of how DYL250 worked. So with about 5 of them gathered
around, I open up the source in what passed for an online editor. We
stared at it, decided to clone "this" line to "over there", "change
this column to xyz", "no it has to be higher up", etc. After a few
minutes of this, I saved the updated source and ran it and it worked.
From that I conclude that "a good programmer doesn't have to know
what's doing." I don't know Pascal, but I modified a Pascal program
once. (It was torture.) In my career, I've modified a few programs in
languages that I don't know. I'll stick with HLA, although I keep
saying I need to learn Metal/C.
Assembler with a good Structured Programming Macros set is almost as
good as C, probably better in a number of ways, at least if you have
HLA watching over your shoulder.
/Leonard
Colin Paice wrote on 9/6/2023 12:54 AM:
I remember going to a customer to discuss a deep technical problem. Before
they let us into the inner sanctum were given a dump and were asked "what's
the problem?" My colleague looked at it and said there is a program check
at this address, and this is fixed in ptf uy.... " come on in you've
passed" they said . They said this weeded out non technical people
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