Battle of the Ages; Stereotypes Collide

JCOTTON writes "A CIO.com article By Phil Murphy explains that "The hype around the shortage of qualified legacy technologists grows each day. Pundits would have us believe that 1.5 million COBOL programmers will suddenly disappear one day, leaving any company with legacy technology in dire straits. The truth is that there are far more programmers with legacy skills looking for work than there are jobs for them, as evidenced by organizations like Legacy Reserves, which functions as a training and job matching service for unemployed or underemployed programmers wishing to modernize their skills." This article explains many of the issues facing "the upper half" of Information Technology workers."

This isn't an article...

[acvh]

it's a fscking advertisement.

Not that there aren't a few good soundbites in it, but come on, a consultant defending consultants isn't news.

Dire need of a dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

"Straits", man. Not "straights".

Re:It usually isn't voluntary.

[jellomizer]

Business tends to feel more comfortable with hiring specialist for some reason. I think they take the adage "Jack of all trades and master of none a little" too literately. They are afraid when they see a resume with 20 different programming languages on it. They much rather find a person who has 5 years in VB.NET then 20 years in programming and only 6 month with VB.NET but they know 2 Dozen Computer languages. They figure if this guy with the 5 years in this language really knows it and can get the job done. And the guy with 20 years is just learning VB.NET from scratch. They don't see the truth that the more language you know the easier it is to pick up on new ones. It is quite possible the guy with 20 years of experience picked up as much knowledge in vb.net in that 6 months that the guy who had no programming experience before picked up in 5 years. When learning to program a new language find out how to output the data to the screen, save to a file and/or database, write to a variable, do loops, and create functions, Procedures and classes. Then you are set to program. The rest you look up while you are programming.

Re:Microsoft Confirms it...

[Hussman32]

Seriously, I think I remember reading that MS said that end-of-life for VB6 is coming up in 2006 or so, but can't find the article where I read that. If it exists, it's likely buried deep within MS's site.

Check here [microsoft.com] for their lifecycle development schedule. VB6 starts termination this year, and closes out in 2008.