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> I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times. It definitely is, not just to see what technologies wer
by iforgotpassword 8y ago
> I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times.
It definitely is, not just to see what technologies were in use, but what an exemplary career in that field looked like, so thanks for sharing. It's just that the first thing that went through my head was this joke, since it's really something that isn't too far fetched situation wise (see that one longer reply).
Fun story:
About 6 years ago, my uncle was still working at a big car manufacturer. They have bounties for when employees come up with ideas to optimize some workflow or cut costs somewhere. He handed in a suggestion to stop computing big reports on one of their mainframes that were meant for being printed out but weren't actually for quite some time, so basically just went to /dev/null, while the generation process took quite some time. There was quite some confusion first since the IT people in charge insisted no such thing was going on, so they had him show them where this job was actually wired in and where the output went. In the end they decided to remove it and paid him some reward. How did he know? He coded that job in the 80s.
I guess your dad would have quite some interesting stories too.
- znpy 8y agoLol. I guess this qualifies as "unethical life hack" ?
- edgartaor 8y ago"Introduce some bugs in the mainframe code so you can earn a reward 30 years later fixing them"
- im3w1l 8y agoWhy were the IT people unaware of it? Was it "wired in" in an unusual way?
- iforgotpassword 8y agoGood question. I can only guess from what else he told about his work that it was simply one of these cases where the younger staff was just not that well versed with the old systems and mostly just managed to maintain them. Most of the stuff that was done in the early days of computing there wasn't formally documented as it was just a bunch of nerds who knew each other very well.* Apparently, when the company got rid of the big printers directly attached to the mainframes they just forgot about that one job, or maybe just removed the print job but not the one that generated it. By the time that happened almost everyone from the old team was already busy with other stuff, much higher up the command chain. * My uncle was actually a maths teacher, but right when he finished college there was absolutely no demand, so a friend already working there got him on board. He learned cobol while trying to figure things out there, reading books day and night...