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