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