On 6/14/2013 9:45 AM, Farley, Peter x23353 wrote:
And therein lies the rub. When companies stopped paying for training in anything except management skills and IBM stopped supporting computer science in universities with free or low-cost hardware and software, the technical knowledge base gradually bit-rotted or retired, until now (nearly) the only people left who know that language have an average age of probably 55 or 60.
It would be interesting to see what the age distribution by skill looks like. I would expect CoBOL to average younger than assembler. But I agree about the training.
About fifteen years ago I got a consulting job at a small ISV. They had a software package originally written in the seventies (or earlier?), that kept failing on 0C4s, among other problems. In the two years preceding, they had hired programmers for routine maintenance and improvements. Some of the 0C4s were due to things like MVC byte,C'A' where an MVI should have been used (this was my first opportunity to write an HLASM exit, to flag low storage references and find the miscreants easily). I always wondered where they found these people.
Another 0Cx was due to an error present nearly forever; two exits used the same save area, but in twenty-odd years had never been invoked concurrently.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
