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Mon, 16 Oct 1995 11:31:48 +0100 |
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Message of Sun, 15 Oct 1995 20:41:58 EDT from LISTSERV list
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On Sun, 15 Oct 1995 20:41:58 EDT Roger Fajman <[log in to unmask]> said:
>Yes, I agree. It's not on my list because I think there is already a
>committment for L-Soft to do that. But it does seem that it's past the
>time that it was promised for.
You're absolutely right. We just have a plain, old fashioned manpower
problem due to the company's growth. Our policy is that customer service
and bug fixes come before development, and lately that has been taking
all available programming time. I wish we could just put money on the
table and summon another 2-3 skilled programmers that would be
operational immediately, but unfortunately that's not the way it works in
the real world. Problem 1 is that the bulk of the applicants come from
the corporate world and have no idea what LISTSERV is (although sometimes
they do have an AOL account). They seem to be good programmers, they
clearly have had experience writing robust production code, but we're
talking a minimum of 6 months before they become operational, and while
being trained someone will not be working on the urgent things he's doing
now, so there's a limit on how much we can train concurrently (currently
that means just one). Problem 2 is that the kind of mindset and
experience one needs to develop a product like LISTSERV that runs on just
about every system under the sun are very hard to find. You can find VM
programmers or VMS programmers or unix programmers or Windows programmers
by the truckload, but they won't be able to write code that works on VMS
*and* unix *and* Windows *and* VM *and* whatever else we may decide to
support in the future. In most cases they're just not interested in
working in an environment with multiple systems of equal importance. At
the very least they expect that we should be migrating to their system of
choice, even if it's not going to happen overnight. But what the industry
wants is more products that can run everywhere, like SAS, Sybase, etc.
Anyway, if you know someone who'd be interested and who has the requisite
background, please put him/her in touch with us :-) Note that we've found
a number of people who can contribute a few overtime hours, but
unfortunately you don't get a working product by adding a number of 0.1
FTE contributions together. We need people who can concentrate on what
they're doing, not necessarily full-time but at least on a 50% basis.
Initially they would take the miscellany away from the people who should
be writing the database and file server code, I'm not proposing to have
new programmers jump right into the fray without training of course.
Eric
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