Re: Is there a mainframe skills shortage?

In article <57147bF29lbfkU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Pete Dashwood <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

I don't think so. It is much better today than it was thirty years ago. I
can remember getting bright eyed, bushy tailed, Computer Science grads,
sitting them down and asking them to do a three file merge in COBOL...

That's interesting, Mr Dashwood... my first response to that was 'there's
no need to do it in COBOL, one uses system utilities (DFSORT/SyncSort) for
such tasks... but if one needs Lines O' Code to satisfy a Corner Office
Idiot then there's a single verb to manage it'.

Be that as it may... I was taught that Computer Science grads should be
designing compilers while applications jockies write the COBOL.


Most of them didn't even know how to approach the problem, yet these same
guys could write a random number generator based on a binary polynomial that
would guarantee never to repeat within so many billion samples... (Not a lot
of call for that in the Banking industry :-))

That's why one doesn't hire CS grads to write banking apps... seems like
our educations were different.


Today, they would look at you and say: "Why would you want to merge these
sequential files when you could have updated directly to a Relational
Database in ANY sequence you like and simply ORDERed the result set?" :-)

'Because two of the files are the inputs from branches with a lot of
activity, (n) tens of millions of records per day; they are MERGEd into a
single dump of the master table and reloaded, directly, into a re-creation
of the master using a system utility. Do you have any idea why that might
be superior to performing individual INSERTs?'

Oh, look... *two* interview questions in one!

DD
.