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My comments

• New home for outsourcers?
  I vote we move all the offshore call centers to Nigeria.
  
  They may be just as corrupt, but at least they're not computer-illiterate.

  August 4, 2005

  0 replies

• Difference between systems and business applications skills
  Although this topic will predictably generate heat and no light from those who consider ?legacy? languages a moral sin, Mr Gilbert has a valid point.
  
  Talking about the shortage (or surplice) of mainframe skills is a waste of time if you don?t differentiate the specialties.
  
  It takes 6 months to learn how to adequately program business applications in COBOL and 2 years to become proficient. With most COBOL business application programmers not due to retire for another 15 years, there IS no COBOL skills shortage ? unless companies artificially create one by making it an undesirable, low-paid, dead end job.
  
  If companies like IBM and MicroFocus can keep COBOL up to speed as a high-level business language, it may remain the BEST modern business language. It is, for those who haven?t kept up to date, object-oriented and can handle XML and HTML. It?s exactly what is needed to code web services and business processes in a quick, cheap, reliable manner. That cannot be said of the various (semi-)scripting languages that are used by most young PC-trained programmers, such as Ruby, Perl and Python.
  
  But when it comes to mainframes systems, we?re in a whole other ballpark. Programming at the systems level (never in COBOL) take decades to develop IF you have the talent. Those jobs are currently very highly paid (>$100,000) and the average ago is well over 50. With almost no-one (whatever IBM says) learning these skills, we really do have a crisis on our hands.
  
  We could repair the business programmer shortage (if one ever arises) in short order. We can?t repair the systems skills shortage nearly so easily.

  July 23, 2005

  1 reply

• C syntax cleaner than COBOL? You're joking surely
  Transitioning one old language into another one nearly as old and even uglier, non business-oriented (remember the BOL in COBOL)is supposed to be a solution??????

  July 23, 2005

  1 reply

• Come back Carly?
  I wonder how many of the 15,000 were dancing in the aisles when Carly Fiorina was sent packing.

  July 15, 2005

  0 replies

• Evidently not
  It's "Parlez vous Deutsch?".

  July 14, 2005

  0 replies

• IT comparable to teaching, librarianship -- not engineering or science
  In 1984, an entry level programmer at our local utility company earned $11,000. That was about the same as an elementary school teacher.
  
  In general back then, programmers earned about the same as teachers and most other IT staff earned less. If fact, there was a lot of back and forth beteween programming and teaching ? and being a librarian or government clerk.
  
  What seems to be happening is that IT employment is falling back to those earlier levels.
  
  Students looking to choose a subject should bear that in mind. It makes no sense for anyone who has the ability to become an engineer or scientist to go into IT, which has neither job satifaction nor high pay. On the other hand, if you have started to hate 6-year olds....

  July 12, 2005

  0 replies

• Excuses, excuses
  Are you sure that you aren't just being polite about poor-quality developers?
  
  Developers can't write doc...developers can't understand buffer overflows...developers can't do this or that.
  
  Good ones can.

  June 14, 2005

  0 replies

• So now we agree that we're offshoring only the *better* jobs?
  Wait a second?wasn?t the claim of the ITAA that offshoring to lower-wage nations would offload the *less costly* jobs and keep the *better-paid* ones?
  
  Now we?re saying that it?s the other way around?
  
  Unless, of course, you?re an executive ? in which case saving money suddenly becomes unimportant.

  June 9, 2005

  1 reply

• What a bunch of clueless comments
  The number of absloutely clueless responses to this article pertty much tells you why there?s a problem ? people trained on PC networks haven?t the slightest concept of how mainframes work.
  
  Somebody took a college course twenty years ago and thought it was simple? I took a DOS course in Basic twenty years ago and thought it was the most trivial college course I?d ever taken. Does that have *anything* to do with modern computing?
  
  Numerous people talk about ?mainframe and servers.? Do you lot honestly not know that a mainframe *is* a server?
  
  I?m reminded of the great classical musician who said how often he was impressed with modern musicians ? until they tried to play classical music. Then he realized how musically mediocre they really were.
  
  I feel the same way about most distributed programmers. They seem bright enough ? until you start talking to them and realize that they lack the serious underpinnings of real computer developers.
  
  My sympathies though are with the laid off mainframe programmer. No, there is absolutely no way you can learn mainframes unless you already work on them. And few to no companies are hiring entry level mainframe developers or administrators.

  June 8, 2005

  0 replies

• What - no women?
  It tells you that they know that this is invasive when they won't even give examples of how female passengers look.

  May 29, 2005

  0 replies