Re: ROSCOE tutorial needed
- From: "Michael Mattias" <michael.mattias@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 13:24:31 GMT
<docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:e2en3v$fai$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Kinda makes me wonder why someone would volunteer to work on a project
involving heavy use of a tool with which they had no experience.
Good point. These are obviously confident people... :-)
Not always right but never in doubt, perhaps.
Or perhaps people who know their skills are portable?
First 'major' contract programming engagement I got was for a major
insurance company in Illinois (whose name I won't give but I will tell you
I was in "good hands") who was looking for someone to handle ANSI X12 EDI
format data, using IBM mainframe COBOL, with IBM DB2 database as the primary
applications data storage.
I had experience handling ANSI X12 data.
I knew COBOL, but I could barely spell "IBM", never having seen an IBM
mainframe.
DB2-brand DMBS was another stranger to me, although I had done some work
with other brand-name ESQL Cobol and DBMS.
I was able to convince the (then prospective) client that COBOL was
portable, ESQL was portable, an IBM Editor was an editor not unlike other
editors I had worked with, a compile is a compile; and that developing and
testing any application was hardware and operating-system independent. I
essentially made them answer the question, "Do you want someone who can
recite syntax from memory but not understand the application, or someone who
understands the application but may have to refer the documentation from
time to time to get syntax quirks unique to their envirnoment?"
Bottom line: I spent nine months there; and both Allstate and I were pleased
with the results. When I decided to leave to return to Wisconsin for
personal reasons, they asked me to reconsider. (Nope, I wanted back to my
native side of the Cheddar Curtain).
As Pete says, 'tools is tools.' If you understand fundamentals, your skills
are portable, even though you may have to do a 'sales' job to convince
prospects of this.
One of the negative byproducts of the 'modern' program development
environment is that the pointy-clicky-draggy-droppy-touchy-feely development
tools don't force progammers to learn fundamentals, meaning the skills they
develop are not portable, and they become utterly dependent on the
availability of specific brand name development tools to create anything.
Combine this with the general tendency to recruit programmers with "Computer
Science" degrees instead of "Three Years Industry Experience Other Than Data
Processing", it is any wonder we see so many examples of application
software which is technically brilliant but can't create invoices or sales
orders correctly?
MCM
.
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