Re: All X'0D' lost during reading line sequential file using microfocus se
- From: Robert <no@xxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:08:47 -0500
On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 12:10:15 +0000 (UTC), docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx () wrote:
In article <ati794tbvu02k92t3od5t0u6g6culuscob@xxxxxxx>,
Robert <no@xxxxxx> wrote:
And why on earth did you - as a professional contractor - accept such an
assignment?
They didn't ASK whether I wanted to do it. They said get it done or else.
See above. In my experience it was either a hollow threat or a place I
did not want to work.
It was not a hollow threat. Either you rise to the occasion or you're
unemployed.
Managing to turn someone else's lack of planning or foresight into your
own emergency is not what I would call 'rising to the occasion', Mr
Wagner... it is what I would call 'paying for your own Vaseline'. See
above, in my experience it was either a hollow threat or a place I did not
want to work.
Lack of planning creates OPPORTUNITIES for contractors. The owner of my contracvting
company says we should always be on the lookout "someone whose cart is stuck in a ditch."
We will offer to pull it out.
When I was a manager, for 20 years, I never used a contractor and was puzzled why anyone
would pay twice as much for a programmer. Now, having been a contractor for ten years,
I've seen a variety of reasons;
1. Employees are spending nearly all their time in meetings, don't have time to do actual
work.
2. Employees don't want to do grunge work like testing.
3. Company politics makes hiring contractors easier than using employees. Hiring freeze.
4. Need sacrificial goats for the annual 10% cut.
Aside: the word decimate came from the Roman Legion practice of punishing an army unit
by killing every tenth man. It doesn't mean destroy; it means reduce by 10%.
5. Kickbacks.
6. Add real expertise to low-skilled team of outsourcers. Rescue them when they don't know
what to do.
7. The manager has no authority to hire employees, can employ only 'vendors.'
8. The HR department is so inept that it cannot find competent people.
9. Management is under pressure to reduce employees. Contractors don't count.
Three weeks of consultant fees totally wasted by the client! I see things
like this and it drives me nuts: just like with lawyers, you get a couple of
bad apples and we ("real" consultants) ALL look bad.
Sounds like bad management.
I've been a consultant/contractor/hired gun for a few decades now, Mr
Wagner, and I've yet to get a gig at a place which had what I would call
'good management'... the nature of my work, perhaps, in the same way that
physicians frequently see a lot more sick people than healthy ones.
I concur.
''We agree on something? One of us must be wrong!', he cried, Wildely.'
All the above are symptoms of mismanagement.
If I refused to do taks for which I'm not qualified, I'd be looking for
a new job every month or two.
Sometimes, Mr Wagner, it works out that one winds up having what one is
willing to accept.
"People get and deserve what they settle for."
Leaving out the 'sometimes it works out that' might be seen as changing
the statement substantially.
"People get what they settle for" is a quotation from Telma and Louise. They don't got to
show you no wimpy qualifier like "sometimes it works out that."
Our experiences, of course, may be different... I've
been asked to do stuff ('we need it yesterday!') for which I did not have
appropriate experience and my response has been 'I have stated,
unambiguously and explicitly, that this does not fall within my existing
skill-set; in order to get it done I will need (time/resources). If those
cannot be made available for me then I must, in all good conscience,
refuse the task just as a plumber would have to refuse a job-order for
rewiring a generator.'
Word gets around.
Word gets around that you're a crochety old guy, which is the kiss of
death outside the
mainframe world.
Mr Wagner, you've made assertions about various 'worlds' in the past which
have been shown to have a curious relationship - or lack thereof - with
what others have experienced.
I relate my experiences with Fortune 100 companies that are household names -- Wal-Mart,
Coca-Cola, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Sears, Sprint, etc. If your mileage varies, kindly
identify the venues where you found more enlightenment.
I work with people in their 20s and 30s who think old
people are too slow
and out of style. They'll fire you in a heartbeat. It takes an effort to
wow them.
Mr Wagner, rest assured that you're not the only one who manages to do
such things... or so my experience shows me.
The VB task turned out be rewarding. It promoted the user (a department manager was the
only user) to enter a month an year (by default it filled in last month), called an Oracle
'stored procedure' to extract one customer's (Blue Cross) purchases to a comma delimited
file, then FTPd the file to the user's desktop. He sent it to the customer as an email
attachment.
Oracle has two kinds of procedure. A classical Stored Procedure is written in PL/SQL and
stored in the database. An External Procedure is written in any language that compiles to
an executable. Both are called the same way; the client has no way of knowing how the
procedure was written. I wrote it in Cobol. It didn't work. It was loaded by Oracle
(technically by The Listener, for security reasons) and started executing, but fell over
on the first IO, even a DISPLAY statement.
The reason was that Oracle loaded the program with default dlopen options of RTLD_NOW,
RTLD_LOCAL, which means discard the symbol table. That's inappropriate with Micro Focus
Cobol because it lazy loads its file system, extfh. A Micro Focus program must be loaded
with RTLD_LAZY, RTLD_GLOBAL, which retains the symbol table for secondary loads.
Apparently, I was the first person who every wrote an Oracle External Procedure in Micro
Focus Cobol. The MF support manager I talked to had not heard of this problem. The
solution was a C wrapper that did nothing but call dlopen to load the Cobol program with
the right options. In retrospect, I wish I'd written it in Cobol.
I wonder whether ANYone else has encountered this problem. If not, it means Cobol is
mortibund for serious development on Unix.
.
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