Re: Sorts (revised)

From: Robert Wagner (robert.deletethis_at_wagner.net)
Date: 06/27/04 

Date: Sun, 27 Jun 2004 10:05:16 GMT

"PAUL RAULERSON" <pkraulerson@verizon.net> wrote:

>Which specific supermarket chain might you be talking about?

The company was Furr's, based in Lubbock. It no longer exists.

> The guy I
>currently work for did some
>*amazing* things at a Texas supermarket chain about the size you are talking
>about, and what's
>more, when he left, the company did about the same thing you describe.

Anybody I might know?

>By the way, I am familiar with HEB, and their IT budget includes a lot of
>things you didn't mention,
>like distributed systems in the store, warehousing, least cost routing for
>the trucks, and RFID. They
>do all that with a mainframe and keep the costs really low.

We had all that too. I forgot to mention them. One of my favorites was a
speech-oriented Order Entry system that ran on PCs and received orders from
Telxon handhelds. Nowadays you can buy the technology from Dialogic et al. Back
then all we had was A-to-D converters. I wrote an audio editor in compiled Basic
using Bascom. Each MSDOS PC could process three parallel threads via
'multi-tasking within the application'. In production, we ran 6-8 PCs.

The most logic-intensive application turned store orders into warehouse picking
documents. It HAD to run in a narrow time window between midnight and 4am. It
did rationing for items with insufficient stock. It calculated Picking Standards
based on physics of tugger movement and warehouse geography. There were tons of
logic in the process. When it cratered, seldom, I personally did production
support. It was mission-critical.

Earlier I worked at Kimbell in Fort Worth, which operated a showplace automated
warehouse. My system picked some items, especially produce, directly off a
receiving dock. It told suppliers on the purchase order "Ship to arrive at
receiving dock x at 3:00 pm." The produce warehouse had less than a one day
supply (vs. Furr's nine day supply). Kimbell was acquired by Winn-Dixie, in
whose hands it died a slow death. Last I heard, they still own it. Store count
is down from 800 to less than 50.

>Also, I have yet to see a UNIX or Windows solution anywhere *near* as
>efficient of machine and
>programmer resources as a well designed mainframe application - which may
>consist of hundreds
>or even thousands, of programs. And that from a person who loves UNIX and
>loaded his Vax11/730
>with BSD as soon as he unpacked his personal tapes.

It was basically a VSE shop augmented with PC applications. We weren't much into
Unix because I found it 'cryptic'. Nowadays, Unix is what I do. I've learned to
love it.

Back in the day (early '80s) I ran drag races between the VSE mainframe running
VSAM (on FBA) vs. a 4.77 MHz PC running Realia's file system. The PC won .. to
my amazement.

Nowadays I work with databases containing millions of rows. Mainframe and Unix
servers have similar CPU and disk speeds. The only difference is cost ..
mainframe cost is out the gazoo. Unix servers are just as fast for a fraction of
the cost, especially if they're running Informix rather than the 'safe choice'
Oracle, whose optimizer doesn't work right.

Hand-wavers like to say X, the object of their derision, "isn't scalable".
Everyone nods in agreement, as though "scalable" were universally understood and
accepted. That's BS. I saw it at Sears, where the payroll system had performance
problems with Informix handling 400K employees. Then I went to US Dept of
Education Direct Loan Program, where Informix routinely handled tables with 30M
rows with no problem.

Later, I worked on Major Big Time databases containing billions of rows.
Performance was not a problem under Oracle, Sybase OR Informix. It's all in the
way databases are indexed and tuned. Today, I saw runtime reduced from 1 hour to
1 second by applying indexes to an Oracle database.

>"Robert Wagner" <robert.deletethis@wagner.net> wrote in message
>news:40ddf3d4.115012207@news.optonline.net...
>> riplin@Azonic.co.nz (Richard) wrote:
>>
>> >robert.deletethis@wagner.net (Robert Wagner) wrote
>> >
>> >> >>In the six shops I managed for 20 years, all programmers were in the
>upper
>> >> >> 10% skill-wise.
>> >
>> >> That speaks to quantity. Quality is subjective. In my Humble Opinion,
>their
>> >> code was beautifully crafted.
>> >
>> >> The following passage was deleted. Using 'The Way Things Are' as a
>working
>> >> interpretation, you argue for the status quo, which is piss poor Cobol.
>> >
>> >I have noticed a common theme. It seems that everything that you have
>> >been involved with is the 'best', is beautiful, is skilled, while
>> >everything that you have never even seen is 'piss poor', mediocre and
>> >'a travesty'.
>>
>> I encourage programmers to strive for beauty.
>>
>> >> If you want more than one-line responses, post something more
>thoughtful than
>> >> attacks on my personality.
>> >
>> >He is not 'attacking your personality', but is commenting on your
>> >observable _behaviour_. You _did_ call what mainframers did as 'a
>> >travesty' and did admit to calling them mediocre and to baiting them,
>> >even when you have never seen any of their actual code.
>>
>> I've seen millions of lines of their actual code. I've rewritten thousands
>of
>> their programs, in some cases every program in the shop.
>>
>> The first thing I do is to modularize IO, one program per file. You talked
>about
>> doing the same. This allows redesign of file structure, or moving it to a
>> database, without recompiling or testing application code. When doing
>that, I
>> usually regression test one or two systems.
>>
>> The result was modular code that was much easier to maintain and, more
>> importantly, make changes with confidence they'd work right the first
>time.
>>
>> For instance, I worked at a medium-sized supermarket company in Texas that
>had
>> 200 stores and 2 warehouses. Supermarket industry norms said we should be
>> spending .5% of sales on IT. The company's sales varied between $1B and
>$2B (the
>> higher number after a major acquisition), so we should have been spending
>> between $5M and $10M. That translates to about 50 programmers and
>analysts.
>> Several competitors I knew details about, such as HEB in San Antonio, did
>indeed
>> spend that much and have that many programmers. We spent $1M per year on
>total
>> IT (hardware, software, paper and programmers) and did it with 6
>> programmer/analysts. The difference was $4-9M hard cash to the bottom
>line.
>> After I left, the IT budget went from $1M, where it had been for 7 years,
>to
>> $7M, within the industry norm. Performance actually decreased and
>programmers
>> said it was no longer a fun place to work.
>>
>> Anticipating rebuttal, you'll say my methodology was tied to a 'cult of
>> personality' rather than a universal solution. Not so.. After I left, they
>> discarded my systems and replaced them with a canned ERP solution.
>>
>> >This _may_ be a result of your personality, or may be because of a
>> >lack of it, I could not judge that, I can only judge what I see in the
>> >words.
>>
>> I've never had trouble getting along with a good programmer, except here.
>My
>> enemies, except here, have been mediocre and bad programmers, who fealt
>> threatened.
>>
>> When I was manager, the problem solved itself because the bad ones quit
>before I
>> fired them. In two cases, they tried to make me look bad by hacking into
>my
>> programs from outside and sabotaging them. In both cases I was able to
>capture
>> an image of their 'tool' and disassemble it. When confronted with tangible
>and
>> irrefutable evidence, they quit.
>>
>> Why is my reception in CLC discrepant with it in the real world? I didn't
>live
>> in a niche or sheltered environment. I worked with people from divers
>> backgrounds ranging from CS academics to self-taught geeks with low social
>> skills. The answer must be in the dynamics of electronic communication vs.
>> face-to-face.
>>
>> Robert
>>
>
>

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