Gartner on Assessing the Age of Software Languages and Tools
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From: Michael Wojcik on 13 Jun 2008 15:13 Pete Dashwood wrote: > "Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message > news:g2s8ab031h4(a)news4.newsguy.com... >> Pete Dashwood wrote: >>> (Client/Server development in COBOL (apart from sites already committed >>> to mainframe COBOL), is almost a twitching corpse...) >> It's doing some Romero-level twitching, then. We have a lot of customers >> with no mainframe COBOL (or mainframes) at all, writing client-server >> apps. Some of those are ISVs who are among the largest in their sectors. >> > "a lot" is relative, Michael. If you had 10,000 even that would not be lot > when considered against the number of computers running applications in the > world... And general-purpose computers running general-purpose applications are a tiny fraction (I think the figure Ed Nisley gave a few years back was 3%) of all the computers running in the world. So what? I don't think that relation is interesting in this context. The important consideration is that "almost a twitching corpse" is subjective, and it appears that what you consider a negligible level of development, I consider substantial. >> I expect COBOL will still be in widespread use in 2015, simply because the >> industry does not, in fact, move very quickly. > > That's an interesting idea. I've always considered computer people to be > reactionary and conservative for the most part, based on my own first hand > experience working on sites around the world. However, there is a new > generation arriving and they are much more clued up than their predecessors > were. They are confident and smart and many of them are impatient for > change. I think they will have an effect as older managers retire. I haven't seen any sign of this bright new generation. What I see, on Usenet and other forums, and among the people I meet in person, is pretty much the same distribution I've always seen of smart, eager folks and grunts who just want to get something accepted with as little effort as possible. >> There's still a lot of Fortran and C development. Even APL still has an >> active community of professional developers. There's been almost no >> movement in general programming toward better (more expressive, safer) >> languages like OCaml. > > But are these pockets of "old time languages" significant in a global > context? Most definitely. A great deal of scientific data processing is still done in Fortran. That's significant, unless you don't care about empirical science. A great deal of OS software (particularly for Unix platforms) and FOSS software is still written in C; that's significant if you use either of those. For that matter, apparently much of the processing in certain specialized but influential fields, like genomics and financial analysis, is done with applications cobbled out of Excel macros. (There have been a number of stories in the Register on this over the past few years.) That's a ghastly environment, with very serious known bugs, but the people developing and maintaining those applications haven't been motivated to rewrite them in something sensible. > OCaml has appeal to purists but most people have never heard of it. If it > stays obscure you can hardly expect programmers to reach for it. It stays obscure because most programmers and software-development managers are not interested in improving the quality of software, if that requires any significant effort or resources. If programmers cared about software quality, they'd investigate ways to improve quality, and they'd learn about safer and more-expressive languages. But most do not. > I'm sure that in 7 years there will still be some COBOL > usage. It just won't be significant. Unfortunately, this depends entirely on the subjective definition of "significant", so it cannot be confirmed or refuted. > Remember there was a time when COBOL > was "the only game in town". We are not going ot see those days again... Sure. Ford's never going to recapture the market share it had in the Model A days, either. But - even given its current troubles - I bet Ford will still be around for a good while longer. >> And mixed-language development is finally beginning to become significant >> in general-purpose applications, particularly in the .NET environment. >> COBOL.NET does everything that any other .NET language does. > > No, it doesn't. It doesn't have reflection, delegation, event raising... it > can utilise the Framework, the same as any other .NET language, but it > doesn't have the innate capabilities of C# for example. You're right; I was too hasty in writing that. MF .NET COBOL does have delegation now (at least in NX 5.1), though. I'm not sure what you're referring to with "event raising" in this context, so I can't comment on that. (You can invoke RaisePostBackEvent properly from .NET COBOL, but I assume you mean something else.) However, reflection et al aren't "innate capabilities of the C# language". They're capabilities of the CLR, and so they're potentially accessible to any language that's compiled to CLI. The syntax for eg reflection may not be in .NET COBOL yet, but there's no "innate" obstacle to providing it. And of course the whole *point* of the CLI/CLR is that it simplifies mixed-language programming, so it's trivial to use one .NET language for the bulk of an application, and drop into another if it is better suited for some particular aspect. >> It's a better (cleaner, more expressive) language than C++.NET (which is a >> nasty amalgamation of incompatible programming approaches), arguably better >> than VB.NET (because VB is just inelegant), and about equivalent to C#. > > Others will disagree with you about .NET versions of C++ and VB; Nah. I'm sure everyone agrees with me. :-) > I'll > disagree with you about C#. :-) Being fairly facile now in both these > languages I would contend that COBOL is not in the same LEAGUE as C# for > .NET development. Fair enough. >> (It's not as good as F#, probably the best .NET language, or the .NET >> implementation of Ruby, but then no straight procedural-OO language will >> be.) > > Certainly there is growing interest and support for Ruby. MicroSoft are > providing support for Ruby with Silverlight and Ajax. I don't know enough > about Ruby to comment and I just don't have time to sit down and learn > another language at the moment. While we may debate the relative merits of > languages, I think you'd agree that all of this is bad for COBOL... The more > alternatives there are, the less incentive there is for people to stay with > it. I could quibble over just what I'd consider "bad", but yes, I'll agree that more alternatives tends to mean fewer people programming in any one of the established languages. I think COBOL's market share will continue to gradually decrease. I don't see anything that would make it increase, and it's not likely to simply hold steady. But I think that decrease is slower than you think it is, and I suspect it will be asymptotic. Most of that will be because of the essential conservatism of the industry. I don't think it's impossible, though, that there will be at least some new interest in COBOL thanks to modern free-format, OO COBOL and environments like .NET. Most source code is a vile mess; most programming languages are ugly, unsafe, and difficult; and people have historically avoided the superior alternatives (indeed, even avoided learning about them - how often do you meet programmers who have ever looked at literate programming, for example?). But despite all evidence to the contrary I still hope that some day some of that may change. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
From: Pete Dashwood on 13 Jun 2008 19:00 "Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message news:g2un6o0nl8(a)news3.newsguy.com... > Pete Dashwood wrote: >> "Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message >> news:g2s8ab031h4(a)news4.newsguy.com... >>> Pete Dashwood wrote: >>>> (Client/Server development in COBOL (apart from sites already committed >>>> to mainframe COBOL), is almost a twitching corpse...) >>> It's doing some Romero-level twitching, then. We have a lot of customers >>> with no mainframe COBOL (or mainframes) at all, writing client-server >>> apps. Some of those are ISVs who are among the largest in their sectors. >>> >> "a lot" is relative, Michael. If you had 10,000 even that would not be >> lot >> when considered against the number of computers running applications in >> the world... > > And general-purpose computers running general-purpose applications are a > tiny fraction (I think the figure Ed Nisley gave a few years back was 3%) > of all the computers running in the world. So what? I don't think that > relation is interesting in this context. > > The important consideration is that "almost a twitching corpse" is > subjective, and it appears that what you consider a negligible level of > development, I consider substantial. > >>> I expect COBOL will still be in widespread use in 2015, simply because >>> the industry does not, in fact, move very quickly. >> >> That's an interesting idea. I've always considered computer people to be >> reactionary and conservative for the most part, based on my own first >> hand experience working on sites around the world. However, there is a >> new generation arriving and they are much more clued up than their >> predecessors were. They are confident and smart and many of them are >> impatient for change. I think they will have an effect as older managers >> retire. > > I haven't seen any sign of this bright new generation. What I see, on > Usenet and other forums, and among the people I meet in person, is pretty > much the same distribution I've always seen of smart, eager folks and > grunts who just want to get something accepted with as little effort as > possible. > >>> There's still a lot of Fortran and C development. Even APL still has an >>> active community of professional developers. There's been almost no >>> movement in general programming toward better (more expressive, safer) >>> languages like OCaml. >> >> But are these pockets of "old time languages" significant in a global >> context? > > Most definitely. A great deal of scientific data processing is still done > in Fortran. That's significant, unless you don't care about empirical > science. A great deal of OS software (particularly for Unix platforms) and > FOSS software is still written in C; that's significant if you use either > of those. > > For that matter, apparently much of the processing in certain specialized > but influential fields, like genomics and financial analysis, is done with > applications cobbled out of Excel macros. (There have been a number of > stories in the Register on this over the past few years.) That's a ghastly > environment, with very serious known bugs, but the people developing and > maintaining those applications haven't been motivated to rewrite them in > something sensible. > >> OCaml has appeal to purists but most people have never heard of it. If it >> stays obscure you can hardly expect programmers to reach for it. > > It stays obscure because most programmers and software-development > managers are not interested in improving the quality of software, if that > requires any significant effort or resources. > > If programmers cared about software quality, they'd investigate ways to > improve quality, and they'd learn about safer and more-expressive > languages. But most do not. > >> I'm sure that in 7 years there will still be some COBOL usage. It just >> won't be significant. > > Unfortunately, this depends entirely on the subjective definition of > "significant", so it cannot be confirmed or refuted. > > > Remember there was a time when COBOL >> was "the only game in town". We are not going ot see those days again... > > Sure. Ford's never going to recapture the market share it had in the Model > A days, either. But - even given its current troubles - I bet Ford will > still be around for a good while longer. > >>> And mixed-language development is finally beginning to become >>> significant in general-purpose applications, particularly in the .NET >>> environment. COBOL.NET does everything that any other .NET language >>> does. >> >> No, it doesn't. It doesn't have reflection, delegation, event raising... >> it can utilise the Framework, the same as any other .NET language, but it >> doesn't have the innate capabilities of C# for example. > > You're right; I was too hasty in writing that. MF .NET COBOL does have > delegation now (at least in NX 5.1), though. I'm not sure what you're > referring to with "event raising" in this context, so I can't comment on > that. (You can invoke RaisePostBackEvent properly from .NET COBOL, but I > assume you mean something else.) > > However, reflection et al aren't "innate capabilities of the C# language". > They're capabilities of the CLR, and so they're potentially accessible to > any language that's compiled to CLI. The syntax for eg reflection may not > be in .NET COBOL yet, but there's no "innate" obstacle to providing it. > > And of course the whole *point* of the CLI/CLR is that it simplifies > mixed-language programming, so it's trivial to use one .NET language for > the bulk of an application, and drop into another if it is better suited > for some particular aspect. > >>> It's a better (cleaner, more expressive) language than C++.NET (which is >>> a nasty amalgamation of incompatible programming approaches), arguably >>> better than VB.NET (because VB is just inelegant), and about equivalent >>> to C#. >> >> Others will disagree with you about .NET versions of C++ and VB; > > Nah. I'm sure everyone agrees with me. :-) > > > I'll >> disagree with you about C#. :-) Being fairly facile now in both these >> languages I would contend that COBOL is not in the same LEAGUE as C# for >> .NET development. > > Fair enough. > >>> (It's not as good as F#, probably the best .NET language, or the .NET >>> implementation of Ruby, but then no straight procedural-OO language will >>> be.) >> >> Certainly there is growing interest and support for Ruby. MicroSoft are >> providing support for Ruby with Silverlight and Ajax. I don't know enough >> about Ruby to comment and I just don't have time to sit down and learn >> another language at the moment. While we may debate the relative merits >> of languages, I think you'd agree that all of this is bad for COBOL... >> The more alternatives there are, the less incentive there is for people >> to stay with it. > > I could quibble over just what I'd consider "bad", but yes, I'll agree > that more alternatives tends to mean fewer people programming in any one > of the established languages. > > I think COBOL's market share will continue to gradually decrease. I don't > see anything that would make it increase, and it's not likely to simply > hold steady. But I think that decrease is slower than you think it is, and > I suspect it will be asymptotic. Most of that will be because of the > essential conservatism of the industry. > > I don't think it's impossible, though, that there will be at least some > new interest in COBOL thanks to modern free-format, OO COBOL and > environments like .NET. Most source code is a vile mess; most programming > languages are ugly, unsafe, and difficult; and people have historically > avoided the superior alternatives (indeed, even avoided learning about > them - how often do you meet programmers who have ever looked at literate > programming, for example?). But despite all evidence to the contrary I > still hope that some day some of that may change. Avery good and balanced response. I have nothing to add except that I endorse the sentiments in your last paragraph. As long as we still need people to program computers it would be good if it could be done well :-) Pete. -- "I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."
From: Robert on 13 Jun 2008 21:09 On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:25:04 +1200, "Pete Dashwood" <dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> wrote: > > >"Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message >news:g2s8ab031h4(a)news4.newsguy.com... >> Pete Dashwood wrote: >>> (Client/Server development in COBOL (apart from sites already committed >>> to mainframe COBOL), is almost a twitching corpse...) >> >> It's doing some Romero-level twitching, then. We have a lot of customers >> with no mainframe COBOL (or mainframes) at all, writing client-server >> apps. Some of those are ISVs who are among the largest in their sectors. >> >"a lot" is relative, Michael. If you had 10,000 even that would not be lot >when considered against the number of computers running applications in the >world... Your point about ISVs is good, though. > >> I expect COBOL will still be in widespread use in 2015, simply because the >> industry does not, in fact, move very quickly. > >That's an interesting idea. I've always considered computer people to be >reactionary and conservative for the most part, based on my own first hand >experience working on sites around the world. Managers are conservative, not developers. The same managers imposed waterfall to retard change. Does IT matter, from a business point of view? Verizon, the number 2 US phone company, runs 30 billing systems it inherited from Bell Atlantic, GTE, MCI, NYNEX, New England Bell, Airfone, Vodaphone, etc. Verizon management believes in 'if it ain't broke.' Sprint, the number 3 US phone company, runs 1 billing system with 50 million customers in a single database. As it acquired dozens of companies, Nextel being the largest, it rapidly moved their customers into its single billing system. The business future of telephone companies now is switching customers to "triple play' (phone, TV and internet) or 'quadruple play' (same plus wireless). Whom do you think is better positioned to do that, a company with 1 system or a company with 30 systems? >However, there is a new >generation arriving and they are much more clued up than their predecessors >were. They are confident and smart and many of them are impatient for >change. I think they will have an effect as older managers retire. Cultures have a life of their own. You can replace 100% of the people, one at a time, and you'll find the same culture in operation. >>There's still a lot of Fortran and C development. Even APL still has an >>active community of professional developers. There's been almost no >>movement in general programming toward better (more expressive, safer) >>languages like OCaml. > >But are these pockets of "old time languages" significant in a global >context? There were 10,000 mainframes in the world in the Good Old Days. Today, there are STILL 10,000 mainframes in the world. Their absolute number hasn't changed, only their market share, which went from 80% to less than 5%. The Cobol universe has become larger because 10,000 mainframes were joined by 5,000-10,000 mainframe-class Unix boxes running batch jobs. I'm talking about HP and Sun machines costing over a million dollars, having 64 cpus, a terrabyte of memory and huge disk silos. >OCaml has appeal to purists but most people have never heard of it. If it >stays obscure you can hardly expect programmers to reach for it. > >> >> The success stories for improvements in software development, like >> widespread (though by no means universal) adoption of OO in >> general-purpose programming, investigation of agile and empirical >> development processes and adoption where appropriate, and so forth are >> hugely overshadowed by the industry's overall conservatism and inertia. >> Most general-purpose software is still essentially produced the way it was >> thirty years ago, with little evidence that we've learned anything about >> software development since then. > >I really hope you're wrong, but I can't disagree... :-) I agree with Michael. >> Not long ago I got a query from a major corporate customer about a product >> that hasn't had a significant release in ten years. They're running it on >> OS/2. There's a migration path; they just don't see any justification for >> taking it, unless and until they're forced to. > >Yes, the old "if it ain't broke..." argument. I guess you can't blame >them... The premier overnight delivery company in the US wanted someone to port an MS-DOS Cobol application running in their Memphis headquarters. They wanted to preserve existing logic and code as much as possible, specifically to keep indexed files. >> That's generally the case with the industry. IPv6 still isn't widely used. >> IE/MSHTML still doesn't support XHTML correctly. (Hell, it doesn't support >> HTML correctly, even in IE8, though it's finally getting close.) Good >> security practices are still not widespread. It's not like any of these >> things are particularly hard to fix - they're just not compelling. >> >> Seven years is *far* too short a time for even a majority of existing >> COBOL users to decide to transition to some other language, much less >> actually make that change. > >Don't be too sure. In the last 10 years I have personally seen 8 sites move >away from COBOL. I'm currently working with another one. While some of these >are SMEs, some of them are not... As COBOL jobs dry up it accellerates the >rate of decline. I'm sure that in 7 years there will still be some COBOL >usage. It just won't be significant. Remember there was a time when COBOL >was "the only game in town". We are not going ot see those days again... See above. There are almost as many Cobol programmers working now as there were in the Golden Age. I guesstimate 50,000 in the US, down from perhaps 90,000 at the apex. The US Dept of Labor reports (2007) total number of programmers is 1,240,000 with average salary $82K. That does not include analysts, administrators, support or network engineers. In 1973, there were 180,000 full-time programmers. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#b15-0000 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=355620.361177
From: Michael Wojcik on 14 Jun 2008 12:32 Robert wrote: > On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:25:04 +1200, "Pete Dashwood" <dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> > wrote: >> "Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message >> news:g2s8ab031h4(a)news4.newsguy.com... >> >>> I expect COBOL will still be in widespread use in 2015, simply because the >>> industry does not, in fact, move very quickly. >> That's an interesting idea. I've always considered computer people to be >> reactionary and conservative for the most part, based on my own first hand >> experience working on sites around the world. > > Managers are conservative, not developers. The same managers imposed waterfall to retard > change. I suspect a majority of developers are conservative. Many of the ones I meet are reluctant to try to make more than small, incremental improvements in their craft. They're not studying software development or computer science; they're not reading journals (even non-academic ones like _Dr Dobb's_); they're not trying out new languages or approaches. And those are typically the ones who are willing to make *some* effort: they go to conferences, or read Usenet groups like c.l.c, or participate in web forums. How many developers are there out there who can't even be bothered to read something like thedailywtf.com, which is mostly amusing and only occasionally educational? Many of the programmers I encounter, in person and online, are pretty content with the way things are - even when that means most of their efforts go to fixing bugs that should never have been introduced in the first place, even when it means constantly reinventing the wheel and doing things the hard way. I think that's true of the practitioners of many crafts, perhaps of all of them; it's likely a consequence of human nature, of the fact that enthusiasm is bounded and we don't all find ourselves doing things we really enjoy, that some people feel a need to improve and others are content as they are. (Some have made strong cases for the latter sort of life, and maybe they're right after all.) In short, I don't think it's fair to simply blame management. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
From: Pete Dashwood on 14 Jun 2008 21:43
"Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message news:g30t23030m3(a)news3.newsguy.com... > Robert wrote: >> On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:25:04 +1200, "Pete Dashwood" >> <dashwood(a)removethis.enternet.co.nz> >> wrote: >>> "Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik(a)newsguy.com> wrote in message >>> news:g2s8ab031h4(a)news4.newsguy.com... >>> >>>> I expect COBOL will still be in widespread use in 2015, simply because >>>> the industry does not, in fact, move very quickly. >>> That's an interesting idea. I've always considered computer people to be >>> reactionary and conservative for the most part, based on my own first >>> hand experience working on sites around the world. >> >> Managers are conservative, not developers. The same managers imposed >> waterfall to retard >> change. Robert, I remember when Waterfall first gained acceptance. (Before that chaos was pretty much the norm and we simply drew a flowchart then wrote the code. In some cases we drew a flowchart and gave it to the "apprentice" to code...:-)) Waterfall was not imposed by managers to retard change, although that was certainly a part of it. It was simply found BY EXPERIENCE that trying to hit constantly moving goalposts was a pretty fruitless exercise for all concerned. Programmers supported the Waterfall every bit as much as managers. It wasn't so much about retarding change as it was about stabilising what was already agreed. At the time, it made sense, and we really had no alternative. The problem was that once a report (and, later...screen) layout was signed off there was then virtually no possibility of getting it changed. This led to an "us" and "them" attitude between IT and the Business and was also the cause of IT getting a bad reputation for delivering less than was required and taking too long to do so. The real problem was (as it still is today in many places) that IT simply could not develop applications as quickly as the business required them, and things changed more quickly in the business than IT were able to cope with. Computer systems were complex, required thousands of lines of code to be reviewed,careful thought before even attempting to change or enhance them, and serious regression testing afterwards. The Marketplace on the other hand was simply fluid and dynamic. IT had no chance of enabling the Business to grab opportunites, or to provide innovative and dynamic system support. Data warehousing and the leveraging of information were simply unheard of and much of the data resource within companies remained untapped like oil seams that are too deep to be economically utilized. One of the reasons I am so "anti-Waterfall" and have been for 20 years now, is because we no longer NEED to do things that way. We HAVE better technology. Component based OO approaches and Visual design tools, distributed networked systems, all work together to get information to where it is needed, WITHOUT the ponderous processes of extensive code maintenance and regression testing. It is EASY to blame managers for everything. Certainly, there have been some bad management decisions, as there have been (and are still) some bad managers, but very often management has relied on technical advice from programmers who had tunnel vision and were only interested in maintAining the status quo. Not that assigning blame achieves anything, but if blame had to be assigned, it would have to fall evenly on IT as a whole, and not just on managers. > > I suspect a majority of developers are conservative. > That has also been my experience, Michael. I have to say that the newcomers are not. However, after a few years they get their enthusiasm knocked out of them and the cycle is self defeating. > Many of the ones I meet are reluctant to try to make more than small, > incremental improvements in their craft. They're not studying software > development or computer science; they're not reading journals (even > non-academic ones like _Dr Dobb's_); they're not trying out new languages > or approaches. > It is very hard to maintain enthusiasm and desire for knowledge over decades (the "yearning for learning" has to be instilled at a very early age and has nothing to do with IT as such...), having invested time and effort to acquire a special skill which is paying the rent quite nicely, it then seems counter intuitive to want to relace it. I suspect this is what leads to the conservatism you noted. After the stress of a day's work, most people are happy to leave it at that and simply don't have the inclination (even if family life allowed them the time) to get stuck into teaching themselves new skills. I know that in my own case I have continually acquired new skills as a result of HAVING to, rather than initially WANTING to. (I have then invariably found the process enjoyable, often to my own astonishment... :-)) In my case it is driven by perception of what I think is going to be important. Having learned VSAM pretty thoroughly I wasn't impressed when I needed to learn IMS; having learned hierarchic and network databases and made a good living off them for years, I was pretty resistant to relational when it arrived on the scene. (Many people were, but few will admit it today :-)) But the landslide started and the pebbles didn't get to vote, so now I use relational... :-) Now I am happily looking at Database Objects, LINQ and Lambdas... even after all these years it is exciting and I believe this will be important for the future (well, it certainly will be for MY future... :-)). I thought OO would be important, so I tried to learn OO COBOL. It was way too hard and took way too long, so I taught myself Java instead. After that, OO COBOL was easier. Then, when it looked to me like the COBOL star was in decline, my COBOL vendor made it unpleasant to do business with them, and it simply doesn't make sense to maintain thousands of lines of code when you don't have to, anyway..., I downloaded Visual Studio Express and C# (for FREE!) and have never looked back...:-) The point is, that even though I am enthusiastic about new things, I still need to be pushed to study them. (I'd like to get into Ruby and PHP, but I simply don't have the time right now...). I think this is true for most people and manifests itself as the observable "conservatism" we see in IT shops. > And those are typically the ones who are willing to make *some* effort: > they go to conferences, or read Usenet groups like c.l.c, or participate > in web forums. How many developers are there out there who can't even be > bothered to read something like thedailywtf.com, which is mostly amusing > and only occasionally educational? Mea culpa... never heard of it. I'll take a look... :-) > > Many of the programmers I encounter, in person and online, are pretty > content with the way things are - even when that means most of their > efforts go to fixing bugs that should never have been introduced in the > first place, even when it means constantly reinventing the wheel and doing > things the hard way. > Hey Michael, it IS a living... :-) > I think that's true of the practitioners of many crafts, perhaps of all of > them; it's likely a consequence of human nature, of the fact that > enthusiasm is bounded and we don't all find ourselves doing things we > really enjoy, that some people feel a need to improve and others are > content as they are. (Some have made strong cases for the latter sort of > life, and maybe they're right after all.) > > In short, I don't think it's fair to simply blame management. I don't think so either (but, as a fair bit of my life these days is spent in managing things, I s'pose I WOULD say that...:-)). Nevertheless, I posted this response in support of yours, which I think was very fair, and all too often here we see people just blaming managers rather than taking even SOME responsibility themselves. The "shop floor" CAN shape management policy, but they need to go about it properly. That means a working relationship with management (even the bad ones). Pete. -- "I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything." |