Is the IBM i community ready for change?

Are RPG Developers are ready for a change?

Some are. Some aren’t. And some are unsure. This is not isolated to the IBM i community. It’s just human nature. As in everything, there are those who don't want to change, those who will wait to see who else is doing it and those who are leading the charge. It’s the traditional bell curve applied to the resistance of change. We use to use the icebox then along came the refrigerator. Some bought one, others waited until they had more information while others took a pass. Today, 97% of the homes in the United States have a refrigerator. This is similar to what we see in the RPG community with:

The question is, how do we get more of the IBM i community transitioning to RDi, DDL and Free Format? One way is through outreach and education. In the coming years, we will see a large number of RPG Developers retire. As they do, it is a perfect opportunity to retrain and introduce RPG to a new generation of developers.

Career

Is your job really going to get any better? Sometimes its hard to believe but it is important to remove the emotion and pay attention to the warning signs that things are not going to get better. People leave good jobs because of a bad boss How could someone leave a great job with a promising career path? "From the outside, these questions puzzle onlookers. But from the inside, it can be a different picture altogether."

Learning

Khan Academy: Starting an Education Revolution It’s time to rethink how we train and re-train our employees. Let’s take a look at the new model that is emerging and how it might be applied to our community. SAP Backs EU Digital Skills and Job Coalition The SAP community (in Europe) is asking a similar question as is the IBM i community: How do we deal with the lack of skills? This is what SAP is doing about it. “SAP will pledge to offer apprentices and students a vocational training or dual bachelor degree”. COMMON focuses on member-driven training.

As Dan Burger points out in his IT Jungle article, COMMON also has its own ideas on training and education for existing and future generations of RPG and IBM i professionals.

Leadership

CEO writes 8,000 birthday cards a year Leadership comes in many different forms. This CEO, for the past 21 years has been giving handwritten birthday cards to each of his employees. It’s remarkable what it has done for the company. Imagine what it could do for your team. Attracting talented developers is difficult, here is how to keep them So, you have hired and an incredible team of developers and you don't want to lose them. By implementing a few key management strategies, this manager has been fortunate to have experienced a 95 percent retention rate.

Modernization

What can we learn from growth-stage tech companies? Interesting article on the growth stages of tech companies and their technology stack. This article suggests that “if you don’t re-engineer your technical stack every five to six years, you cripple your ability to offer the best product and user experience to your customers.” This is an issue all mature companies deal with including organizations running the IBM i. DevOps processes don’t work well if old business models don’t change

As organizations implement new technology it also requires a new way of thinking. A "different mindset is required to make DevOps processes work for enterprises today." The hard part is to break old habits "developers and managers need to realize that the tools and methodologies they're using today will be replaced when better ones come along. "

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