Hmm.

You assume they are smart. They've survived the worst of the worst. In my company, these poor bastards had to write about 3 pages of JCL to copy a damn file. It was insane.

You figure that if you show them a way to make their life easier it will be good.

So you show them some regular PC apps, throw in a bit of development system, and it is incredible. Their productivity skyrockets by a factor of 10, at least from their point of view of what they were able to do before. Too bad that 10 to 1 isn't good enough when you are trying to escape old mainframe apps. It's like gravity, you have to reach escape velocity or you get sucked back in.

And they love using Excel for interactive data production, stuff they used to do in the MF in COBOL. They get trapped in end user applications for production all the time. Of course, this is a management problem, but these apps end up in production with no oversight since they are no longer using the expensive MF resources.

They take either the hardest path (let's just run that data over the 20 years old programs in the MF, since we know how), or the esiest (to them), let's run the data over this new GUI whizbang interactive program we just wrote.

Boss says use the new system.

Ooops, let's run it again, it is a daily task.

Ooops, this fun pretty environment sucks for automation (at least from their point of view), so guess what? The expensive highly skilled MF programmers just got a daily production task assigned to him.
And every time they take a task off the MF, they end up creating just one more interactive task that isn't designed to be automated.

These tasks usually depend on a single person's PC for producton since it needs the local application stack. All of a sudden, the entire groups needs all the apps installed in case they need to run it. But their PCs are development PCs, with a variety of mutually exclusive stuff installed. No one every trusts anything other than the original PC.

So a couple of years later, 1/2 the MF staff is dragged down in Windows style production, and then they call me in to rewrite what I can using Unix environment.

While attempting to train the MF/PC people.

But they ALREADY went from MF to PC, they HATE the concept of lots of typing, they just escaped that, they have no foundation for toolbox programming, and they believe that there is simply no better way for any particular task, since they already moved it.

They consider a better method of cut&pate to be the ulitmate productivity enhancer. They lecture proudly on how fast they wrote 10,000 lines since they just had to copy a bunch of subroutines from a few other systems.

And GUI code generators? Love'm. For a while, they were paid by line.

They hear enough about Unix to think it is far more complex than anything they've ever done, it does it wrong, and they don't like it.

You get tired of fighting with them, and spend more time writing scripts to automate them out of existence than pretending to train them.

So most of them are done. They've been converted into one-off production monkeys rather than real programmers. Maybe I was able to salvage 3 people out of 20 in my career of doing this.

The other direction?

PC means way too much. Focus. Do you mean MS centric desktop programmers with SQL back end experience? Or do you mean webby gui people? Or back end transaction processing with a variety of systems, just not MF?

Or do you mean Unixy people? Which is way different from the above? Or even Linux server / windows desktop people, which is yet a different group.

Of the various groups, I'd say old style Unix people pickup the JCL and concepts faster than most, but they will end up writing scripts on the Unix side to control the MF via tn3270. Whining the whole time how much it sucks. Been there, done that.

After that, you might get a tiny tiny subset. If you have a well defined highly constricted world, then MS centric programmers will probably be the best starting point. The MS way is like the MF way. Do it our way or suffer. You'll be suffering anyway, but not as much. They are probably better at adapting to the MF contraints. Sheep can be guided.

Anyone else with a variety of tools under their belt will be driven crazy by the restrictions of dealing with the MF. They might initially do fine (if you held a gun to their head), but a few weeks later they'll be looking of the next gig.