In 1985, when I started with IBM and VM (VM/SP at the time), I was in awe with the size of the world and the size of IBM. This was a shock for a kid who grew up on a street called Cowpath Road. I believe IBM was around 405,000 employees world wide in 1985. Being on the same "team" with that many people was something I don't think I comprehended right away. I was still dealing with just the population of IBM Endicott at the time. Depending on how you defined it, IBM Endicott included the Glendale, River Plaza, North Street, and Century Plaza locations. I don't recall the total Endicott population in 1985, but it was easily over 12,000. The main products in that era were printers, processors, programming, and the check processing machines.
What was really special to me was no matter what question I had, there was someone on the site that could give me the answer. While there was a nice library on campus, I just always found it easier to ask someone. In some ways, this isn't all that different than googling for an answer today. Only instead of clicking, it would start by spinning around in your office chair to ask your office mate, "Hey, do you know who can tell me about the 3330 DASD?". Very seldom did I have to visit more than two or three people to get my answer. Like the Internet, I suppose I needed to be cautious about the degree to which I trusted the answers I was given. However, my gut tells me those answers were more trustworthy than a random Google response today. I don't have data to prove it, it's just conjecture on my part. It seemed people were more careful then to delineate between how they knew something worked versus how they thought it should work.
It's not the job, it's not the company, it's not the technology that matters, it is the people. It has taken me a lot of years to figure that out. Google is not people (although I use it for a lot too these days). Back when (insert large-company name here) could afford teams that focused on key technologies, finding those to mentor with or ask questions was easier. Today it seems that except for those I have a working relationship with, people are too busy to be bothered. A bit sad, but that is what a lot of corporations have done by shrinking the work force and requiring more from those left.
ReplyDeleteCuriously you and I have similar job histories in that I have worked for Nationwide since 1985 and in VM too. Not quite as fun as your job since I was just a pesky end-user of your teams' code :-) I would have preferred being a VM developer but I landed here and things have been generally good.
I enjoy your blogs/thoughts, Bill. Very insightful.
We're all old farts: my oldest exec I wrote in Feb '85 :-) and I still use it many times a day.
DeleteThanks for the feedback. Yes, I believe we could probably trace changes at both Nationwide and IBM that happened over the years. Everyone thinks Dilbert is about their own company. :-)
ReplyDeleteAnd we don't consider you a pesky end-user. I have several 'reflection' posts planned for the category of customers.
Ironically I too landed in VM in 1985 as an IBM co-op student in Houston. We were pesky end users of VM like Jim too, providing both internal systems and NASA systems support.
ReplyDeleteIt is the people indeed. I stuck with VM because of the people doing it. The MVS guys didn't seem to have near as much fun as we did :)
I joined IBM Poughkeepsie in 1968 with precisely the same experience as Bill, feeling that I'd landed in techno-heaven, surrounded by wizard colleagues and the source-of-all-wisdom room (what Bill called the "library"). I loved walking in with a list of manuals and walking out with documentation on whatever new mainframe hardware/software had been announced that day. At some move or job change I regretfully let that carefully built manual collection go, for two reasons -- no place to keep it and no way to move it. Well, three reasons: By that time it wasn't exactly current information.
ReplyDeleteI left IBM (where I'd been in OS/360 System Design) in 1971 to join Mitre, where we installed VM/370 Release 1 PLC 9 in 1972, when I joined the newborn VM community. It's indeed the people! But I sure enjoyed VM more than I had OS.
Hi Bill,
ReplyDeleteI am starting my new job working on Z/OS at Cigna and will be following your posts!
Thanks!