We're writing this on the plane flying from Stockholm to Heathrow en-route to a brief stopover at home before we head to Minneapolis for the upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit.
Our friends at Data3 did a wonderful job and the event was very successful with more than 100 of the faithful gathered together to hear about the "latest and greatest" in all things IBM i. The location was beautiful too - just outside the downtown core right alongside the channel into the main harbor. In fact one of the sights at the hotel is to watch the daily arrival and departure of the large and very modern ferries, which the locals affectionately refer to as the "booze cruise." Two or three of these leave Stockholm each day and make the overnight run to Finland or sometimes, apparently, simply into the nautical equivalent of no-man's land. Why? Because Sweden has very high taxes on liquor and apparently these cruises take long enough for you to qualify for a substantial duty-free allowance. As our friends Trevor Perry and Alison Butterill noted, this accounts for the people getting off what appears to be a cruise liner carrying only tiny overnight bags--and very large bags of duty-free items!
But telling you how lucky we were to have been teaching in such a gorgeous location was not intended to be the point of this blog. Instead we wanted to pass on a story related to us by our hosts of one Swedish company's successful approach to the problem of finding new RPG blood. Like many of our customers, the company faced an aging RPG population. While some of their work is outsourced, the organization felt the need to have a strong in-house core to the development team. The solution was to hire recent computer studies graduates and have them trained in RPG. Those of you who read our blog regularly will know that this is an approach we have long advocated, and we have been involved in several such programs. It was encouraging, therefore, to see others successfully using this approach. The training consisted of a three-week classroom period, followed by four weeks of practical hands-on experience and then an additional week in the classroom. Needless to say, crucial to this effort to persuade these new hires that RPG did not mean "Role Playing Game" was the use of modern tools like RDP--no green-screen chains for these newcomers!
If you can read Swedish you can find the details in Data3's excellent magazine. We tried Google translate but it just isn't good enough to publish in that form. So, we hope to work with our friends at Data3 to produce an English version, which with luck we can share with you in next month's IBM i EXTRA eNewsletter.
It is nice to hear a story with a happy ending! But Jon will probably never persuade Susan that herring is a real delicacy worth exploring.
Our friends at Data3 did a wonderful job and the event was very successful with more than 100 of the faithful gathered together to hear about the "latest and greatest" in all things IBM i. The location was beautiful too - just outside the downtown core right alongside the channel into the main harbor. In fact one of the sights at the hotel is to watch the daily arrival and departure of the large and very modern ferries, which the locals affectionately refer to as the "booze cruise." Two or three of these leave Stockholm each day and make the overnight run to Finland or sometimes, apparently, simply into the nautical equivalent of no-man's land. Why? Because Sweden has very high taxes on liquor and apparently these cruises take long enough for you to qualify for a substantial duty-free allowance. As our friends Trevor Perry and Alison Butterill noted, this accounts for the people getting off what appears to be a cruise liner carrying only tiny overnight bags--and very large bags of duty-free items!
But telling you how lucky we were to have been teaching in such a gorgeous location was not intended to be the point of this blog. Instead we wanted to pass on a story related to us by our hosts of one Swedish company's successful approach to the problem of finding new RPG blood. Like many of our customers, the company faced an aging RPG population. While some of their work is outsourced, the organization felt the need to have a strong in-house core to the development team. The solution was to hire recent computer studies graduates and have them trained in RPG. Those of you who read our blog regularly will know that this is an approach we have long advocated, and we have been involved in several such programs. It was encouraging, therefore, to see others successfully using this approach. The training consisted of a three-week classroom period, followed by four weeks of practical hands-on experience and then an additional week in the classroom. Needless to say, crucial to this effort to persuade these new hires that RPG did not mean "Role Playing Game" was the use of modern tools like RDP--no green-screen chains for these newcomers!
If you can read Swedish you can find the details in Data3's excellent magazine. We tried Google translate but it just isn't good enough to publish in that form. So, we hope to work with our friends at Data3 to produce an English version, which with luck we can share with you in next month's IBM i EXTRA eNewsletter.
It is nice to hear a story with a happy ending! But Jon will probably never persuade Susan that herring is a real delicacy worth exploring.
Oh, I will put Erik to translate the text as I'm the boss now :-). you were all very apprecited as speakers, see you in Sweden next year!
Posted by: torbjorn appehl | October 17, 2012 at 04:12 PM
That approach sounds like my experience out of college. I accepted a job offer from a small "midrange" (okay, S/32 and S/34) consulting firm near Chicago. The company probably had about 30 current employees at the time, and they had a trainer teach the new college grads--about 8 of us or so--the fundamentals of RPG III (or was it RPG II??). (At the time I remarked that it looked a lot like assembly code, being column oriented and not even having control structures like IF or DO!)
They counted on hiring smart people who would make good consultants (not just programmers) and teaching them the technical knowledge they needed.
It worked out pretty well, as employees from that company (PCR, or Professional Computer Resources) went on to found companies like SSA, Silvon, Advanced Systems Concepts, Systems Start-Up, and others, or to hold significant roles at places like CA, Oracle, Synon, and more.
Posted by: BobL | October 17, 2012 at 04:19 PM
I followed the link titled "execellent magazine" and noticed the picture with the caption "Scott Klemens får pris", which I assumed meant Scott Klement for President. However Google translated it to "Scott Clement awarded prize". It's pretty impressive how some people get around. It's good to hear about other companies training new RPG recruits, not just me.
Posted by: Nathan Andelin | October 17, 2012 at 05:47 PM
Something similar worked at Countrywide Mortgage in 1999 but the students were recruited from the business side. All but one succeeded in the class. The graduates all became very good RPG programmers. About 20 RPG programmers went through a similar class and were taught Java. It turned out that they didn't need 20 Java programmers though.
Posted by: Greg Helton | October 20, 2012 at 06:35 PM