Then what happened? Y2K passed with a whimper instead of a bang, a country was torn apart by a presidential election that wouldn't stop, and our hearts were broken by the numbing horror of 911. This was followed by recession, a war in Afghanistan, rising fuel costs, and an economy that had decided it was time to sleep. AS/400 programmers found that they were no longer in demand as much as they used to be, and the jobs began to disappear. Added to that was the insane rampage to jump on the Java bandwagon and, in the process, dump anything perceived as legacy, as if becoming platform-agnostic and getting rid of systems that had been working fine for years for the dubious benefit of being able to use a Web browser would make up for corporate America's years and years of poor business decisions. Things began to look bad for the AS/400 programmer.
Then what happened? Wall Street discovered that Enron and WorldCom execs were overstating profits while racing to their multi-million dollar mansions built on the retirement funds and salaries of their employees and the investments of their stockholders. At the same time, Arthur Andersen, whose business it was to keep the corporate giants honest, was too busy to stay honest themselves because they were seeing how much they too could steal from the working man. America took another shot to the chin, and our faith in our economy stumbled again.
On the IT front, Java was still riding the crest of maniacal popularity, even though only about a quarter of the entire programming population could program effectively in it, and the AS/400 began an identity crisis that has not yet ended, starting with IBM changing the name of the system to iSeries. IBM, taking the shotgun approach to marketing, said, "You want Java? We can give you Java! You like Linux? We can do Linux on the iSeries. You want WebSphere? We have 30 different flavors of it on our iSeries! You want browser-based access to your apps? We can give you that too! Domino? We have it! Microsoft? Run it inside our iSeries! We are insane! We will do anything! AH HA HA HA!" Corporate America's response was a resounding, "Nah. The AS/400 is dead. We're going to keep reading our management journals and do whatever they say instead."
Then what happened? America took on a new war in Iraq, and suddenly our best and brightest were being sent into battle instead of into college. The rising cost of fuel began to have a direct effect on the failing American economy, and businesses were forced to consolidate, downsizing and instituting layoffs by the tens of thousands. Corporate America looked around for ways to cut costs, and a third-world nation raised its head and said, "Send us your jobs! Let our people write your code for pennies on the dollar!" And corporate America listened and sent those RPG, COBOL, and Java programming jobs to India. Meanwhile, the AS/400 professional, who had been doing a terrific job as a programmer, now found herself greeting shoppers at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, IBM felt pressured to lose the AS/400's "legacy" image, so they enabled it to do so much at the same time that the AS/400 began to get the reputation as the Swiss Army knife of computing platforms. Interesting on an intellectual level maybe, but who has the time or money to keep changing their business culture every few months to run on an increasingly expensive and schizophrenic system? At the same time, the Wintel world was gleefully pointing out that a PC server cost only a few thousand dollars while the iSeries was several orders of magnitude more expensive, so why in the world would your business want to throw money away when our economy was so bad? Added to that was the knowledge that third-graders were being taught to program in Visual Basic, and suddenly seasoned programming professionals found themselves competing for their jobs against pimple-faced kids not yet old enough to buy beer.
Then what happened? Our nightly news told horror stories of our heroes in Iraq being killed, not by a dedicated enemy fighting for an ideal, but by anonymous and uncaring roadside bombs, and our nation wept. The President told us it was all over, but the dying kept on. Mother Nature decided that she'd had enough and threw several tantrums at our southern shores to try to shake us out of our lethargy, but that only served to highlight our incredible ineptness at responding to domestic disasters, and it shined a light on our inability to look beyond class or skin color, and again, our economy took a shot to the eye. And IBM, feeling that this time they had the solution that would turn it all around, renamed the system once again, this time from iSeries to i5.
But then a funny thing happened. Despite everything—despite the wars and the rising cost of fuel, despite the worst that nature could throw at us, and despite an idiotic and useless name change to the AS/400 platform—the American economy began to rebound. Slowly, profits started to climb, and slowly, jobs began to reappear. As business started to regain its footing, a need for programmers began to grow, and the AS/400 programmer began to believe that maybe things were finally turning around.
Then what happened? What happened is that everything that has happened during the last six years to our economy and our industry has come back to haunt the AS/400 programmer. By this time, there are so many dedicated AS/400 programmers out of work that a single job listing on Dice or Monster nets hundreds of resumes. Suddenly, it is no longer a buyer's market. It is now a seller's. Headhunters can pick and choose, and if you don't know Java or .NET or have not worked on J.D. Edwards or Synon for the last five years, you don't have a chance in hell of finding a job that will pay you enough to keep that house you bought when times were good. And the cost of fuel continues to rise, while at the same time programmers are forced to search farther and farther away for gainful employment.
So where have all the jobs gone? For the AS/400 RPG and COBOL programmer, the answer is to that question is simple: Your jobs have gone to India, or they've turned into Visual Basic and Java programming positions, or those that remain are held by AS/400 programmers who understand that they have to fight tooth and nail to hang on to what they currently have. And that leaves the rest of us out in the cold, living on retirement funds, giving serious consideration to those late-night truck-driver-training-school commercials, and wondering if IBM will ever spend any time, money, and effort to promote RPG and COBOL, the backbone languages of the AS/400 system—and incidentally, corporate America—and hoping that corporate America will wake up in time to realize that if it keeps sending all of our jobs overseas, soon there won't be anyone left in this country able buy their products and keep them in business. And the AS/400 programmers sit and stare and shake their heads.
And now what will happen?
Shannon O’Donnell is a freelance writer who specializes on the iSeries. He can be reached at
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