Top Five Things I Hate That Have Happened in the Evolution of My Job.
Well I usually try to stay pretty positive here but a while back when I told you the top ten things I miss, I mused that maybe a list of top x things I hate would be in order. Maybe hate is too strong. As my mother used to say (still does, actually), ‘Intensely dislike’. There certainly have been some great improvements to my work flow and productivity during my career, but not all of the changes have been good, at least for me.
So here we go…
5) PCHIDs. Listen, I understand the reason for them, honestly I do. But it’s such a pain, translating back and forth. Mapping, I guess it’s called. I long for simpler times when 8D was 8D, not 101.
4) Lowercase stuff. Passwords. Comments. Unix Systems Services. Nuff said. I yearn for Caps Lock.
3) Keys. Remember back in the day when you could run anything anywhere? (smile) There were never any license keys. I pine for those days…
2) The Manual Situation. I crave a real live physical paper-smelling coffee-spill-decorated manual. I realize that softcopy has made searching amazing. But we’ve gone from BookManager to PDFs to InfoCenters to Knowledge Centers and each has its pros and cons as well.
1) OCO. Object Code Only. I’m a debugger at heart and I used to love going through a dump, matching up instructions, trying to figure out where things went wrong. I miss a good dump.
Honorable Mention: Green Bar paper. I know, I’ve pined for green bar, on this blog, before. Longing, yearning, pining. I’m so nostalgic today. Speaking of which, nostalgia. Wikipedia says ‘Reliving past memories may provide comfort and contribute to mental health.’ So go sort your jcl library and tell me what the oldest member is. Mine is a receive apar of PK81392 UK43964, an ICKDSF ptf from 2009. In fairness, I only started this job in January 2009. Scanning the jcl libraries of a few other sysprogs, I find TMS JCL from 1984, an IEBCOPY from 1986. But I digress, I’ve strayed from topic. I know, imagine your surprise.
Of course there are offsetting things that have made life so much easier. TCP/IP. Multiprocessing. IPCS, SMP/E. But that is a topic for another blog…
What’s the biggest productivity killer for you in the last 20 years?
Your link today is to the recently available z/OS 2.1 manuals….
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/bkserv/v2r1pdf/
Have a great day!
Mary Anne
z/OSsyGirl