Wonder how he made senior. Politics and not skills or expertise.
At 03:19 PM 3/15/2024, Farley, Peter wrote:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64+1 from me on
continuing to learn the tools of our
profession. I use STRING and UNSTRING where
they make sense, and I am still learning new
things about their use every now and
then. Life-long learning is the only path to happiness and success.
I got the same ridiculous pushback from a senior
manager one time on the use of sophisticated
SORT verbs like JOIN because . . . no one but
you will know how to fix it when it breaks . . .
let someone do it in COBOL instead . . ..
Peter
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List
<IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDUÛ Behalf Of Bob Bridges
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2024 12:38 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Learning one's tools
To rant on a related subject, I once worked at a
company that instituted code reviews; a new
program would be gone over by a half-dozen
coworkers to be sure it adhered to local
standards. This sort of thing is always painful
to the coder, and nevertheless (I admit
reluctantly) can have considerable value if done
right. One problem I had with it, though, is
that the standards we created for ourselves
admitted that there are times when exceptions
should be made for special cases, and yet when
those cases arose no exceptions were ever
allowed; the team invariably flinched, leaned
back in their seats and said "no, that's not according to our standards".
One particular example always rankled: Whenever
someone felt the need to use a STRING or
UNSTRING command (I should have said we were
COBOL developers), the team always struck it
down on the grounds that STRING and UNSTRING are
unusual commands and some COBOL coders would be
unfamiliar with it. My contention here is that
that's absolutely true, and it's the job of the
COBOL coder to ~learn~ the STRING and UNSTRING
statements, as tools of his profession. I never
persuaded anyone to that view, though.
---
This message and any attachments are intended
only for the use of the addressee and may
contain information that is privileged and
confidential. If the reader of the message is
not the intended recipient or an authorized
representative of the intended recipient, you
are hereby notified that any dissemination of
this communication is strictly prohibited. If
you have received this communication in error,
please notify us immediately by e-mail and
delete the message and any attachments from your system.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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
