It's still the #1 most-demanded skill in IT

This company that provides repair services is acquired by a larger outfit, and that means the acquiree's systems are being converted to run in the acquirer's data center, reports an IT consultant pilot fish who's on one of the project teams.

"We were converting code from a minicomputer to a set of programming specifications," says fish. "Those specifications would ultimately be replaced by Cobol, CICS and an IDMS database on an IBM mainframe.

"At that point, I had IBM mainframe experience including Cobol, along with some training in CICS, but no IDMS/DB."

Fish's specific assignment is coming along nicely, but other projects aren't so lucky. Case in point: There's an application that tracks the time between calls for service, the service person's arrival at the client, and completion of service. It's been converted, but it isn't calculating hours correctly.

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