Reinvention is as American as Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who noted that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds”, or Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict
myself?
Very well then I
contradict myself
(I am large, I contain
multitudes)
In this
nation where cosmetic surgery is a $10 billion dollar business, recreating
yourself is a constant theme of literature, art, and business. To someone with
my background who despaired of every getting a job, I wrote that “before
presenting yourself in the marketplace, I think it’s important to reflect on
what you’ve achieved relative to the current market demands. You’ve valuable suitcase skills, but you’re
not only keeping the suitcase closed, you’re throwing away the suitcase! You should consider redefining yourself in
terms of supporting the mainframe as a server in a client-oriented
organization. Those with hybrid
skills—big iron plus client/server—command premium rates at many firms. So ask yourself: What is it that I have
worked on that either interfaced with emerging technology or created the
pre-conditions for emerging technology?
If you have ten years of mainframe experience, without even knowing your
experience, I would say that you have at least seven years of client/server
experience but are just not aware of it.
You need to be rigorously introspective, digging into your past for
those analogues to those engines of today’s information technology, which is
e-commerce, distributed objects, multi-tier client/servers, networks, and relational
databases. There is no need to lie. You simply need to find out all the truth
about what you really have done and then communicate that truth in a way that
brings offers. The best artists and
politicians constantly reinvent themselves, as do the best companies. The horse and buggy factories of the 19th
century were the car builders of the 20th century and will be
centers of e-commerce of the 21st century. If there is one principle that I have learned
in twenty years of data processing, it is this: we must adapt, we must learn,
we must build on our past experiences, we must orient our minds to what the
market place wants, or we will get the sustained unemployment and
underemployment that we deserve."
I expanded on these thoughts in another
posting in 2000 to a newsgroup that I entitled “This Mainframe Dinosaur Made
the Jump.” “I started out in PL/1, IMS,
RPG, and VSAM. Today, I code PL/SQL,
Oracle 8i, JavaScripting, and Java, and command
appropriate market-competitive rates. In
making the transition, it became clear to me that “there was nothing new under
the sun” and that the leap from the procedural world into the object world was
not that great conceptually. I’ve never
taken any formal classes, although I read everything I could get my hands on,
immersed myself in web sites, downloads, code examples, books, magazines, and
manuals. For me, entry to the client
server world came not through language as much as databases. I had some background in DB2/SQL, which I
then segued into Paradox, Access, and then Sybase and Oracle. The key thing is to approach new technology
with curiosity, looking for hooks between what you do know and what you must
know, and then by systematically filling in the gaps through personal
initiative. My approach is to buy two or
three solid “bibles” from different publishers from the local bookstores,
download as much production code as I can get from the site I am at, create a
“hello world” application, expanding it with additional operations, and then
going out to the web for forums and
tutorials. My website www.mymallandnews.com,
that currently gets more than 150,000 hits each year, was an effort to improve
my coding skills. Without being too
arrogant about it, I truly believe there isn’t a language or a system that I
cannot master within a month by using this approach. I do realize some people need the structure
and the security of a classroom, but for me a “university of one” is the way to
go. And you can’t beat the tuition.”