The kids nowadays ...

I was talking with someone the other day and we were both commenting on how we both had high expectations of developers.  Perhaps too high.

When I was just starting out in this business the mainframe was still the big thing.  I remember going to the launch of the IBM PC that IBM had in town and thinking that if they did this right IBM had a gold mine on their hands.  Well, they blew it, but the industry did not let the personal computer drop and the world was changed.  I learned lots of stuff on the mainframe and then applied it to the PC world.  I learned how to debug properly when you could only do one compile per day.  I learned how to design things properly when you had 4K of memory to use for your application before you had to start worrying about addressing problems.  I learned how to adapt the mainframe mindset and use it in an intelligent fashion on the PC.

Kids these days don't do that.  Schools don't teach it and the kids have no opportunity to learn what I learned.  While I may have owned my first computer before some of you were born (March 15, 1981 was when I bought my Apple ][+) I've had so much more varied opportunities.  I've worked on large mainframe applications, large PC applications, large web applications,  I've worked on machines were space was at a premium, both disk space and memory and you were challenged to be as efficient as possible.

The kids these days are challenged to be efficient.  If it works on their dekstop then it must work on the server for hundreds of people and, if not, it's the deployment team that needs to make it work.

I think it's a shame that mainframes are being relegated to the back room because I think the lessons that they taught are still applicable today, but there is an entire generation that will not learn those lessons.