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Ah yes, takes me back to the time when 'Data Analyst' was an actual profession, and organizations planned their workloads in order to place an appropriate order
by marktangotango 11y ago
Ah yes, takes me back to the time when 'Data Analyst' was an actual profession, and organizations planned their workloads in order to place an appropriate order for 'enough' IBM hardware and dasd. Back then, during the first wave of business automation via computer, the processes being automated were so well defined, this level of understanding was acheivable; when you have rooms full of clerks calculating monthly payroll, you KNOW what the data is.
In so many domains today, you don't know, and the business is forgiving enough (or amateur enough?) that THEY don't even fully understand their processes.
- nostrademons 11y agoOr agile enough. Most of the the time, when business processes are a mess, it comes from learning from their customers and being relentlessly customer-focused.
- rodgerd 11y ago> the business is forgiving enough (or amateur enough?) that THEY don't even fully understand their processes. After the first few waves of automation, the business made the savings to justify automation by sacking everyone who understood the processes, all the RPG programmers who moved the processes into code have retired, and now we're getting by on hope and hacks.
- busterarm 11y agoAnd when you're in the crosshairs of a weird edge case, you are fuuuuucked. Even the guy I knew who drew payroll & disability for 9 years after being terminated. They finally caught up to him.
- emersonrsantos 11y agoEveryone bash Cobol since the dawn of microcomputing, but the definition of a "Data Division" section where all data is specified before literally any actual line of code is something very interesting. This language implementation mostly made the Y2K transition so sucessful, and today these Fortune 500 companies are still stuck with their legacy systems which were written by people "with a clue" back then. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
- riskneural 11y agoCobol is interesting, but horrifically impractical in practice. Cobol is my bugbear language... I just couldn't solve problems in it. It somehow separates what should go together and puts together what is unrelated.