IBM System i staffing

RPG as a service

Beyond the world of IBM i, the hottest topic in IT right now is “Cloud Computing,” which is essentially a mix of platform and software-as-a-service (PaaS and SaaS) offerings that are available on-demand. So it was with a little amusement and some interest that I read the press release from vLegaci offering RPGAAS. That’s right, RPG as a service.

“… designed for companies who don’t always have an RPG programmer available, or need quick, cost-effective programming results…”

After a year of reading emails from readers inquiring about a variety of topics, I have to think that there is a market for such a product, and vLegaci’s President, Steve Kilner, says that Gartner’s findings support this supposition.

“Consensus is emerging from IT thought leaders such as Gartner Group and Capers Jones that maintaining and modernizing legacy systems gives the best possible return on IT dollars,” said Kilner. “For businesses with legacy RPG systems, the dwindling pool of RPG programmers poses the challenge of how to get unfamiliar programmers up to speed rapidly on complicated legacy code. vLegaci addresses this through the use of its innovative program comprehension tool, Codelyzer. This static and dynamic analysis tool enables new programmers to quickly assess unfamiliar RPG programs, thereby enabling the concept of a service such as RPGAAS.”

What do you think? Is this a service your company could use?

IBM not marketing System i technology as it should

Trevor Perry has a belated analysis of the merger between System i and System p into Power Systems, but it comes about because of a recent trip he made in South Africa last month. Bottom line: Perry thinks System i folks need to stop talking about the name, and IBM needs to market the System i technology on equal footing with AIX and the former System p brand.

IBM also promised us that there would be marketing of Power Systems with all three OSs mentioned - AIX, IBM i and Linux. This promise remains unfulfilled on the outside of IBM, with no apparent marketing to support the premise that IBM i is the OS “for business”. Even the Power Systems home page at IBM does not show the three logos together.

It is no wonder that IBM i continues to be pushed out the door. Most people consider the AS/400 to be old and worthy of replacing with non-IBM i systems. Our community indulges themselves in the safety net of calling it an AS/400, only to find themselves without a job, and without a future.

Do we still have time to restore IBM i to the glory of the legacy it has left? Probably not… But we ~can~ turn around the impression that we work on an OLD system, with OLD tools, building OLD applications.

In South Africa, Perry spoke with companies still stuck with AS/400s, coding like it is still 1999, and in general, not keeping up with modern technology. As a result, one IT director there felt he had two options — outsourcing the System i work or moving to a Java-based application infrastructure. Since the first is hard to come by, that leaves the second.

And that leaves the AS/400 on the verge of falling off the map there. Perry said the midrange presence has been “decimated” there in the last few years, estimating that only about 10% of AS/400, iSeries and System i servers still remain.

“New Power Systems may be sold there, but the IBM i operating system seems to be making no headway,” Perry wrote.

IBM laying off thousands, say reports

According to multiple reports, IBM has laid off thousands of workers in the past few weeks, including in Rochester, but has been able to circumvent federal laws about reporting those layoffs by scattering them throughout its various locations over a period of time.

Alliance@IBM, an IBM employee organization that doesn’t have official union status because it can’t get enough members, has speculated that IBM will fire 4,000 workers today, mostly in the services department. But System i developers are seeing the hit as well, with reported layoffs ranging from 400 to more than 800 in Rochester, Minn., the long-time stronghold location for System i development. Many of them are older software engineers who will have a tough time finding another job, especially in that area.

At the same time IBM is firing U.S. workers, it is hiring in China and India, a fact that rankles the laid-off employees. The New York Times reported that IBM has fired about 4,600 North American workers in the past few weeks. IBM calls this the normal course of doing business, and has often managed to keep these layoffs quiet by circumventing the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. By keeping the layoff numbers relatively small compared to its total workforce, and scattering them across multiple sites, IBM can avoid having to notify local and state officials of the firings.

Train your RPG employees and pay them well

It turns out that the secret to retaining good RPG programmers is simple: pay them above average, and train them well.

Is this different from any other profession? Probably not, but in the System i world, holding onto good RPG talent and keeping them happy is not an easy task. During a surprise birthday bash in California, the folks at iDevelop chatted it up with another attendee who manages a team of RPG developers. Here’s their story:

It seems that she must be doing something very right because her team returned a 96+ percent job-satisfaction rating on a recent company-wide survey. The goal the company had set was less than 75 percent so the high rating among the developers was evidence of the great job the management team was doing to keep them happy and productive.

What’s her secret? She attributes it to two major factors. First, they pay attention to salary levels in the industry and make sure they are paying a bit above the average. Secondly, and we personally believe at least as importantly, they make sure all their developers are consistently and regularly trained in the latest features and technologies related to their RPG development. She feels this investment in training not only has the obvious positive benefit of making their applications as good as they can be and the developers as productive as they can be, but it also helps tremendously in staff retention.

Sometimes doing one of the most difficult things — like getting and retaining good RPG developers — takes simple solutions.