7 ms·
In the mid-90s, I worked at what had to be one of the last serious DEC/VMS holdouts: TeleCheck. That they had ended up on VMS was not evidence of a bad choice,
by ubermonkey 7y ago
In the mid-90s, I worked at what had to be one of the last serious DEC/VMS holdouts: TeleCheck.
That they had ended up on VMS was not evidence of a bad choice, but by 1995 it was pretty clear which way the market was going, and that they were about to be kinda out in the cold. They'd also managed to give themselves an ENORMOUS case of the MUMPS (1), brought on by an almost religious devotion to "not invented here" syndrome.
(Part of that was justified -- they couldn't get what they needed out of a commercial DB early on, so they wrote their own. And then KEPT writing their own well past the point when they should've been evaluating migration to COTS. But that's just a background detail.)
Anyway, at that point if you read any industry press, or went to any industry event, or were even vaguely aware of computing trends, you KNEW the future didn't include VMS, and that even the Alpha architecture -- which was cool and powerful! -- was doomed. But not at 5251 Westheimer; there, the Kool-aid was DEC-flavored, even to the extent of making bizarre counterfactual claims about COTS options, or other hardware, or whatever. "Sun" was a dirty word there; hatred of Unix was an article of faith.
It probably won't surprise anybody to hear that turnover there was INSANE. I stayed 25 months before moving on; that was about normal. Those that did stay became more valuable to the organization, but not so much that they ever got market raises or anything. And of course by staying, they let their skills get farther and farther out of sync with the rest of the industry, thus making it harder to leave.
1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS
- Rochus 7y agoWhat do you have against MUMPS (i.e. ANSI M)? It was a great technology of its time, and there are still many critical applications running with it today, and internationally recognized companies like Intersystems whose products still run ANSI M inside.
- ubermonkey 7y agoRead the link. Companies that develop their own idiosyncratic dev systems are generally making a mistake. Developers who endeavor to master those systems are using energy and time to add a skill to their resume that has zero value on the open market, which is a bad career move.
- Rochus 7y agoI read it. The article is superficial and one-sided. And there is nothing wrong with companies building their own tools. There are many such companies, including SAP, Microsoft and Google.
- jacquesm 7y agoMost companies are not SAP, Microsoft or Google, and would do well to stay miles away from developing their own tools. Because the tools that you develop then become the millstone around your neck in the longer term. Unless a tool gives you a major advantage you should never go near that. Your competitors will all happily use COTS, drop projects and adapt new tech while you will be stuck in the hole with your sunk cost and impossible to migrate toolchain. That sort of situation has sunk more than one company.
- ubermonkey 7y agoAND more than one career, too. Folks who invest their careers in single-company toolchains tend not to have very remunerative or rewarding careers. It creates a monstrous imbalance between employer and employee, too -- all the "lifers" who stayed at TCK were being paid well below market, but couldn't command better elsewhere because their whole professional life had been spent on single-site tools. That's MUMPS for you.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's an excellent point. Working on a single company toolchain when that company isn't a household name is a career dead end.
- ubermonkey 7y ago....which is the whole point of the MUMPS link to DWTF, so it's weird that the other guy is dug on on an alternate interpretation.
- jacquesm 7y ago> It was a great technology of its time It was. And then that time came and went and after that it became harder and harder to justify its continued existence and development of applications. I've worked on a moderately complex mumps system for a bank and the amount of arcane trickery to work around the limitations of the core MUMPS system were mind-boggling. The whole thing had to interact with other systems via trick comms links and the fact that it worked at all was a small miracle. There are some other systems that are still in use even today that should have probably never been built in FoxPRO, Filemaker and other pieces of software of a certain age.
- Rochus 7y agoWell, some MUMPS implementations had adverse limitations, but there were also others, and companies like Intersystems managed to gradually expand and continue using the technology successfully. What becaume know as "NoSQL" was already available in MUMPS 40 years earlier. MUMPS as a language has many disadvantages, but the concepts are still amazing today.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoNoSQL databases came before SQL, irrespective of MUMPS. But back then they just called them databases.