Remember how the mainframe market was in the 70s and
80s? I started my “commercial”
programming career with the Univac 1108/1110, so in the mid 1970s, the first
step was to “get IBM”, particularly because I wanted the convenience of New
York City. That led me to switch from
NBC to Bradford and New York State MMIS.
(Actually, during my Univac years I had “switched” from FORTRAN to
COBOL).
After a move to Dallas (with the Blue Cross and Blue Shield
consortium), I got exposure to database and teleprocessing monitors, IMS and
CICS, but only at the design level. I
needed code in these areas. I got that
at Chilton (now Experian), but that was with ADR’s Datacomm DB and DC, which
failed to stay competitive with IBM (just as Univac and Burroughs had failed in
the whole mainframe box area). Got
it? I also got experience in “low level”
code with mainframe Assembler.
At Lewin-ICF, for 18 months, back in DC, I got some SAS
experience, and found they actually used Fortran and even VM (this was
1989). When I went to USLICO, which
became ReliaStar and ING, I thought they had everything. There was IDMS, CICS, MSA-IE, Vantage, and in
Minneapolis, we added DB2. And there was
the usual big effort for Y2K.
Why didn’t I remain marketable after the big 2001 layoff and
forced retirement? Because, after Y2K,
the market really became short-term-focused and demanded expertise in very
narrow areas. The market would look for
people who could go from one TDY assignment to another to keep an old IMS shop
running. Or it looked for people with at
least five years in MMIS. Or five years
of Vantage (where you really need to know the system, because “it rules the
world”). All the sudden, the market
rewarded short term specialization, even if dead-ended.
Picture: Is "WMWare" what I think it is?
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