Ted - I must say - your answer is Brilliant! Although it may have seemed
obvious to you - it wasn't obvious to me. However, I was feeling a LOT
of pressure to give them the kind of response they requested - and now I
know WHY - since I was given a nearly impossible task. As you stated,
one can NOT truly make a reasonable suggestion without thorough research
and review!
Thank you Ed & Stephen for your corroboration - I really appreciate it.
On 3/20/2019 4:28 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 1:45 AM Kurt at VR-FX <v...@optonline.net> wrote:
The second interview is coming up, it's supposed
to be this Thursday, but I might try to postpone until Friday. Too much
stuff going on in my life lately, including doing 2 different part time
jobs and an extended relative who passed away recently,
I'm sympathetic to your situation, but you don't want the wrong interviewer
hearing that you're too busy babysitting parrots to interview for a job.
That's harsh, and you might not want to work for such a jerk, but you don't
want to raise red flags, or even questions, during the interview process...
Actually - during the interv iew process they did ask me what I am
currently doing. And, they actually got a kick out of the bird hotel &
my teaching work. But, truth is - its the family death that's also
having a impact. And, the boss suggested postponing the interview - and
I originally said no.
OTOH, you don't want to work for jerks, either. OTOOH, they're paying
peanuts and desperate for Fox expertise. Your call,
Your Jerks comment is funny - and I can understand - since the pay is so
low. But, I'm not going to say anymore on that topic.
Am rushing to make these replies - then shower & get the hell out of
here - since I have a long drive to go between SF & SD - and a deadline
about 7pm!
-K-
It looks like UCLA really wants to move away from Foxpro, as they know
it's a dead language. But, they want to move to something similar to
VFP.
And that's why they are hiring you. I you have an answer during the
interview, you'd be jumping the gun. "If all you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail." Your job should be to learn the app, learn
what it interfaces with, what it gets for inputs and what it needs to
output (PDF, JPEG, XML, JSON, CSV, EBCDIC?) and determine the optimal tool
to do all of that and hopefully minimize the transition. It may be really
easy to migrate the app to FoxXYZ, but if that can't do what they need,
that's useless.
A 30 year's experienced app developer may have some real legacy stuff in
their app, and conversion can be a large undertaking. Along with a parallel
investigation of what the client needs the app to do is an audit of what
the application already does, Whil's Developer Guide went into this in some
detail, and I presented a series of lectures with checklists and software
for an initial audit.
So, the answer to the question on what they should do is to ask what they
want, and what they have? How many lines of code? How many tables? How many
fields? Where's the ERD? How many output documents, reports? Where does the
data come from? Where does it go? What's the IT infrastructure? What kind
of data servers do they support? What kind of maintenance windows are
allowed? Where are the users? How do they access the data: PCs, laptops on
the road, tablets, phones, embedded in other services? How responsive does
the app have to be? What happens in case of failure? What's the backup
strategy? What's the disaster recovery plan?
I suspect its also because the 1 and only programmer there, who's
been there for like 30 years and may be retiring soon - doesn't want to
learn something Totally new. And, also wants to minimize the transition!
It's likely your job is to learn everything the old Obi-Wan knows and
become the new master. Realistically (and perhaps this isn't an interview
topic), you'll keep the old app running for some time as you transition the
data model, the business model, the services model and the interface(s) to
the new platform.
They are asking me to propose what I think is the best option.
When a consultant tells me they have the solution to all of my business
needs by replacing a 30-year-old system with whatever they are selling, on
the first meeting, sight-unseen, I would be rightfully skeptical.
The right answer is that they need to let you learn the app and research
the right solution. If you can convince them you are knowlegeable about
what is available, and what the issues are that need to be addressed in a
migration, then they should hire you to do your job.
There are a lot of good resources out there, like this list, the FoxWiki,
books, whitepapers, but you will need to do the footwork. See if you can
convince them to pay you to do that.
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