Senior programmer?

There are many things that piss me off, and the list gets bigger as I get older. Right up at the top of my list are "Senior Programmers" who just make no effort to figure something out for themselves before asking their coworkers. At my job, these people have been given the name "AS400 fuckers" because they all seem to be AS400(platform) RPG(language) programmers. These guys are old school green screen, dumb terminal, 1970s computing type guys who, like their language and platform, have struggled to stay relevant and up to date with modern technology.

We have a whole mess of these guys here. Normally we just kind of shake our heads and snicker about how they can be completely secure in their careers with titles like "Senior Programmers", despite the fact that they have a hard time using a mouse.

I was discussing a development with me and one of the AS400 fuckers today with my buddy Squid Dog. He thought it was funny enough to write a blog post about, so here goes:

On 1/4/07, Will wrote:

So get this.

In the past year, we've lost 5 guys on our network/PC support team out of a total of 6 at the beginning of the year last year. Two guys quit outright, two more moved to different positions completely in the company, and one guy slid to travelling tech for the auctions and stuff, so he travels around the country doing support crap for the car auctions. Anyhoo, this leaves only one guy to handle all the server and PC stuff here in Nashville, where it used to be split up between 6 guys. This guy is basically just going home to sleep a few hours and then coming back here. He's working at least 12 hours days for 7 days a week. They had a guy helping him, but that guy quit also.

What this has to do with the AS400 fuckers is this... Yesterday was our monthly staff meeting. I sat close to the bossguy, which is fairly normal. In the meeting, bossguy says that since the PC/network guy is working so hard, we should make the effort to not add so much to what he has to do and try to handle as much of our PC problems internal to our department. Since we're pretty smart people as a department, makes sense. Bossguy as an example said that instead of calling the PC/Network guy, maybe see if Will can help. That was AS AN EXAMPLE.

This morning, this one AS400 fucker has called me 5 times. Twice just since I started typing this.

First time he called me to say he couldn't edit a PDF that our corporate office had sent him. I responded that PDFs are a one-way thing, and that it wasn't intended for him to edit and send back like a Word doc. I told him he'd have to print it out, fill out the blanks, and fax it back to them.

Since then, he's emailed me about setting up AOL Instant Messenger on his computer. I responded to him with the www.aim.com site and told him to click the big green button that says "Install Now". He's called me for every single step of the process. First one was that it asked for a screen name to sign on with. He just starts putting in shit, not even thinking that he should have to maybe REGISTER if he's never gotten a screen name and password from AOL. I mean, does he try to do internet banking by just typing in random usernames and passwords? Scratch that, if this guy can figure out how to do internet banking, I'll eat my shoe. Anyway, next time he calls because it says he can use an existing email address and wants to know if he can just use his address here. I'm like no..., they mean that for an existing AOL email address. This fucker's killing me here dude.

Make it six times, now he can't figure out what fields are required on the registration form.


On 1/4/07, Squid Dog wrote:

Hahaha. Man, it's hard to imagine that they have ever touched anything with electronic components in it. That is just awful dude.


On 1/4/07, Will wrote:

The kicker is that he's a "Senior Programmer", and has been here at least 10 years now. As long as I've been here, (started here the first time in 1998), we've never had mainframe dumb terminals or anything like that. As long as I've been here we've had PCs and used Outlook for email, everyone's had internet access, etc. There's no excuse that he's worked in a dumb terminal environment for the past thirty years. This guy is basically like one of those people who has lived in the US for 10 years and can't speak a word of english.

Oh, he called again and I finally went over there. He apparently couldn't read the part that said his screen name had to be letters and numbers only. He was trying to use an underscore. Then, he got signed in and couldn't understand why everyone he knew didn't just automatically pop up there. I guess he thinks there's a magic database out there somewhere floating around with the contact info for everyone and their mother.

Motherfucker just came over again! This time he says that another AS400 fucker only has Yahoo instant messenger, so he can't use his AIM to talk to him. I told him he'd have to register with Yahoo and download their IM client in order to talk to them (his head might have exploded if I had explained Trillian to him). He seemed upset that he'd have to keep more than one window open. I told him that he could close them and it still be going as long as he saw the icon in his systray. That got me a blank stare. I told him it was there his clock was down in the lower right of the taskbar. He didn't seem to grasp that stuff can be running without actually having an active window on the desktop.

I need to go punch bossguy in the nose for mentioning my name instead of someone else's.


On 1/4/07, Squid Dog wrote:

Hahaha. Man, that is all hilarious right there. I love it.


On 1/4/07, Will wrote:

This guy is the reason I even coined a phrase "AS400 fuckers"


On 1/4/07, Squid Dog wrote:

hahaha. I can see that. What a dumbass.


On 1/4/07, Will wrote:

I'm telling ya. It's like they don't realize that as long as you have a computer and internet access you can find out how to do pretty much anything.




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This post is tagged iSeries, AS400, fossils, senior programmer, and AS400 fuckers