You know something's wrong with IBM's way of doing things when it's easier, cheaper and more straightforward to learn how to work with their machines by buying one on auction and tinkering with it, as opposed to getting training for it. A sad state of affairs.
On the upside, you're making sure that the only people left on your platform are interested, and patient people. Who usually gravitate towards being competent in what they do. - I'm wondering right now how many people on the list can make these configurations. I'm guessing 1-2 people per shop (in mine anyways) would set up everything in the Service Element / HMC, defining the profiles and building the IOCP. That would make the people with these skills fairly rare. Connor contacted me on another website where he shared this story. I pointed him to the list for help on getting the machine to IPL something, since my 2 years of "experience" never forced me to configure a mainframe from scratch. But neither of us could really wait, so we just dove in to the manuals (~10 of them on the first night for nothing but Service Element, IOCP and OSA). There are very few things that can make me stay up until 7 AM after a week's work (6 hours difference between our time zones), but this certainly was one of them. So thank you Connor for the unique experience, I learned a lot along the way, and I'm hoping I'll get to learn much more. Now if only IBM gave these kind of opportunities to juniors, they might have a better shot at fixing their skills gap. I'm positive that the interest is there. _Jan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
