There is no reason to keep a 40 year old mainframe.
Communities are getting swindled out of millions because they don't have people competent enough to understand computers running their computer systems departments.
I know this because I worked for one. There was a database administrator who did not know how to turn on the database.
A senior level programmer who took 6 months to write an application that I finally wrote for him in 6 hours. He had to call a MEETING of 6 people to debug some code that turned out to be something as simple as trying to write 50 characters into a space allocated only for 40. It took me 3 minutes to find this- before everyone even sat down at the meeting.
They spent $250,000 for a ‘xml interface’ to copy data from one table to another. At the meeting where I called them to explain this, I DID IT in front of them in about 5 minutes. They just wanted to be able to market that they had an ‘XML interface and expected us to pay for its development.
When I asked my manager to get our $250,000 back she said that there was no process for returning funds that were already spent.
When we brought this up with the company they said they would give us 'free hours' of ‘tech support’. I asked them how much tech support would I need for a 5 minute operation. (As an aside they told me that once I left the remaining employees would probably need every minute of it- because they would not remember how to do it)
This is your tax dollars at work. And it is exactly the same people who will be running Obamacare.
And when I finished my contract there they hired cousin Jeffrey from the Parks Department to fill my spot- This guy was mowing lawns on Friday and writing software on Monday. I had to show him how to turn on the computer.
Where I work everything for one of the systems I work with is done in Microsoft Sql server. There is this one guy on the team that is the absolute guru of all that is this system. The system is VERY clugy and we are trying to replace it with a new one. He is constantly stepping to the plate to analyze and adjust for new requirements. It is very time consuming and costly.
Two weeks ago, for the first time ever, I had to actually look at some of his code to create some requirements because the business could not articulate them well enough. It was the worst spaghetti code I had ever seen. It was only 8 pages and was virtually indecipherable. My MO is to understand a bad program by rewriting it. I did this to his 8 pages over the weekend and ended up with less than 2 pages that did the same thing. From that I easily created business requirements that were accurate.
No wonder their system is so messy. GRRRRRR!
You've got a book (to write) in there somewhere... a funny one...
Who would want to put the time and effort to learn skills that are applicable to ONE SPECIFIC COMPANY? It is a pure dead end job. A skill that is of value to NO ONE ELSE. It’s almost cruel to put someone desperate for work through that. Especially since you know they’d dump the guy in a heart beat as soon as they don’t need him anymore.
A job like that is a terrible career move.
LOL!!!!
You have no idea of the data throughput mainframes put out, do you?