The Big Shift To The Home Office

Photo by Radek Grzybowski on Unsplash

Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

News: The IBM i stimulus and the 2020 Technology refresh for IBM i.
Hiring: The Home Office has taken on a whole new meaning. RPG developers are taking advantage of the opportunity to work remotely.
Leadership: Thoughts on how to lead through a crisis.
Learning: What is college for? The shift to online learning and the apprenticeship model.

News

Where Is The Power Systems-IBM i Stimulus Package? It's already here. We are on uncharted territory but I believe we will see IBM i shops embrace the platform even more. We will see modernization efforts continue to push forward and more and more shops realize the best stimulus package the IBM i will ever see, has already been given to us.

Now is the time for the IT department to be stepping up and figuring out how to support employees remotely and make sure applications can extend out over the Web. We might be fighting this pandemic for a whole lot longer, and if not, we suspect that a lot of people won’t want to spend quite so much time commuting to the office any more.

RPG developers are taking advantage of the opportunity to work remotely. Remote work is the stimulus package.

The 2020 IBM i Technology Refresh is here

Overview: As expected, the latest Technology Refreshes were announced for the IBM i.

Among the goodies that will become available for IBM i 7.4 TR2 or IBM i 7.3 TR8 (or both) are enhancements to Db2 Mirror, a new approach to tape library virtualization, improvements to open source, and new features and functionality around Db2, RPG, RDi, and security, too.

There are far too many announcements to cover so here is a good overview of what is covered by IBM Systems Magazine. The core areas that are covered are: Clustering, Db2 Web Query, PowerHA, BRMS, Hybrid Networking, RPG, Access Client Solutions, Db2 SQL and Open Source. If you prefer to take a look at the 2020 iSight presentation done by Steve Siebly and Steve Will, they can be found over on the COMMON website.

Hiring & Remote Work

How To Set Boundaries At Work When It’s Hard (Working Remotely) The following is a story that might ring a bell for a lot of hiring managers. It makes even more sense to RPG developers who are routinely interrupted when trying to work on an application.

I once managed a very talented graphic designer who could never seem to hit deadlines without staying late and working weekends. She seemed miserable. As her boss, I was worried. The reason for the late work wasn’t because she was slow. Her output was fantastic. The problem was that most of the day she would get pulled into "urgent" projects for our salespeople who needed custom pitch decks. She’d often work all day on those, and then stay up late doing her marketing design work for me.

Takeaways: Remote work is not for everybody. The ones that it is for, they sure are more productive. Will employees want to return to the office? Some will. Others won't.

Employees now know that most employers have the means to facilitate work-from-home arrangements in the long term. Once the crisis passes and regulators give the all-clear to return to normal life, thousands of employees will choose to maintain their newfound flexibility.

Regardless of which route employees take, the way we work has fundamentally changed. Forever.

Freelancing Gets A Major Growth Spurt

Calling all RPG freelancers. The current market conditions are fueling the need for RPG Freelancers in the IBM i community. While some organizations are pausing in their hiring, there are others who fall into industries and markets where there is still demand. In either case, the big shift will be to leveraging consultants (freelancers) instead of hiring direct. Would you like us to keep you in mind for RPG Freelance work? Or, are you looking to hire a remote RPG developer? Either way, reach out to us here. We can help.

Leadership

CIOs and COVID-19 crisis: thoughts on business continuity This article addresses some important questions. Like most challenges that face leaders, they often come about in the form of a crisis. Regardless, business continuity is often misunderstood by CIO's let alone leaders in all functional areas of an organization. What is unique about the role of the CIO, is that it is paramount to the survival of the organization on multiple levels. The CIO is the conduit between technology and the business. They provide the glue that holds everything together. Technologists have an equal role. They must be skilled in their craft to offer expert guidance to CIO's. Because it is their expertise that helps advise and guide IT leadership through the challenges of growth, crisis, and change.

Learning

No College This history lesson from Nick Litten is timely. It begs the question that I have often asked myself.

What is college for?

The perspective much of the IBM i community comes out of is one that is similar to Nick's. RPG has traditionally been taught at the technical college level or through some sort of apprenticeship model. The masses of RPG programmers hit that market mostly throughout the 1980's, and 1990's. Looking for an IBM i apprenticeship program? imPower Technologies' online training program has been ramping up over the past couple of years. Good thing, because they are just in time. The education market has made a hard shift toward online training. It happens to be a better way to train RPG Developers.

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