10 dying IT skills (No matter how good you are with these skills, you won't get a job today)

Tech Republic ^ | June 28,2009 | Linda Leung

[AFreeBird]

LOL

bump

[Clinging Bitterly]

Ha. Our company’s business system is written in COBOL. The IT guys joke they have to recruit programmers at the local rest homes.

[DigitalVideoDude]

Yes and yes.

We had an Acrnet network with a 4-user Novell server running on a 286 machine back in the day. The Arcnet cable looked like Coax. We ran a QuickBasic application with Dbase2 as the database. Everything was MS-DOS.

I must be old now.

[Poser]

Ah yes...
But did you get the

g=c800:5

When nobody knows that one, I’ll know I’m old.

[IronJack]

That’s right. RI instructions don’t have a place for an index reg.

[jurroppi1]

I never gave it a lot of thought since the last time I used SAP was in a company where we converted from MRP to SAP and it actually went really well. At the time our switchover was the greatest success story for SAP switch overs. It took us something like 2 years to do it, but the new system (SAP) was much better once you forgot everything you knew before in MRP.

SAP basically runs the company I work at now, except for some legacy systems we used for manufacturing traceability (I am in manufacturing engineering on the electrical side). Scuttlebutt is that we will be going to SAP for all of our transactions on the production floor, so I will have to re-learn how to use the system because it has been about a decade since I last used it.

So I guess to answer your question; I think they make too much at more than twice my salary, so I would say it’s worth more on the order of perhaps 80-90K to be a SAP expert (meaning you can program and manipulate the system).

[Minn]

Although the stories of SAP sucking companies dry while imposing crap on them are legion, my only direct experience with it was for time reporting at my last contract. With the possible exception of Microsoft Zune software, I've never seen such a digital abomination. You literally needed a charge number to account for all the time it took to navigate all the pointless and horrible interfaces SAP would present you with to simply enter 40 hour under various charge accounts. I can say without the slightest exaggeration that the people that designed that interface were off the charts incompetent as designers, architects, developers and QAs.

How any executive could look at that outrageously defective and hideous interface, that plainly showed the incompetence of all involved with it, and say "sure let's pay a few million up front and a few million a year more a year for that" is way beyond me.

[jurroppi1]

I don’t know how it has changed over the last ten years, but when I used it, there did seem to be an inordinate amount of drilling up and down, navigating away from what seemed to be intuitively the correct place to head to in order to get information.

Apparently it wasn’t as bad then as it is now - of course I have no idea since I’ve been able to avoid using it for a long time. I remember that we needed to switch from MRP because our system had become so customized that we just couldn’t get any support for it anymore. Supposedly SAP fixed all that, but now I hear whole hosts of people telling me that our SAP system is pretty heavily customized.

I don’t know, because I don’t program business systems. I just program ATE and the like, some databases, some HTML, some scripting, VB and dabble in other things like C++. I’m an Expert electronics tech, so I don’t have a lot of call for most of the so called IT skills - other than knowing how to fix PCs and having more knowledge that most of the up line tech support personnel do also.

[RebelTex]

Carefull, you might reveal the secret code of ‘the over the hill gang’, LOL.

[Vortex]

Oh man! I wrote a disassembler for the Z80 (TRS-80) back in ‘79. Is no one using that any more? I’m bummed, now. What am I going to do with all these cassette tapes?

[SpaceBar]

Actually I was researching the subject some months back and was pleasantly surprised to find a resurgence of interest in the lowly Z80, with modernized versions currently available that are popular and inexpensive platforms for teaching microprocessor basics. In short, it looks like reports of the death of the modest 8-bit platform many of us learned on might be greatly exaggerated.

[Only1choice____Freedom]

Have you heard of the programmer who dies in the shower?

He was grasping the shampoo bottle that says:
lather,
rinse,
repeat

[Still Thinking]

Arcnet Cable IS coax. RG6, I think.

[DigitalVideoDude]

There ya go. Haven’t seen that stuff in a few years myself.

[calex59]

So does that mean I have to shelf my vacuum tube design and Fortran 4 skills as well ...

Not if you can design a vacuum tube that is about .002 inches in size:).I personally like the audio tubes produced compared to solid state and digital, but that is just an old ham talking I guess.

[Bogey78O]

Yup...ATM is a lifesupport technology. It’s lingering but there’s nothing new for it as MPLS and IP is all the rage. Why use a bastardized bit system with 12% overhead when you can use a system that has only 2% and protocol support to match ATM reliability?