>>>It is fortunate there are those with a capacity to work year after year without ever learning anything new or getting excited about advances in their field.
>>>If I were to project my own personality on those cobol people I'd have to assume that the most important "benefit" the employer would have to offer would be 24/7 suicide watch. ( cobol .. hell, Foxpro ! )
>
>To build on the Keynote from SWFox: quality comes from minimizing variation and standardizing, not constantly reinventing and starting over. Most industries figured this out a lot quicker and even much newer industries are miles further down Quality Road. Meanwhile developers think they'll be allowed to behave like Picasso forever.
>
>;-)

So cars should be using the carburation system they had in the 50s because we could have kept using the same parts and tuneup skills.

Sure, shaking the sandbox just for the sake of shaking (and of course the worlds of art and fashion and entertainment are often good examples) dont' necessarily improve the overall field, but failure to innovate productively and to embrace the innovation is deadly intellectually, spiritually and practically.

Curious - are you still doing new development in VFP? If not, why not. Do you think doing non-legacy VFP development today is an example of standardizing and minimizing variation to improve quality?

But as to my point, I wasn't speaking to the greater good of software development as I am not sure there is such a thing. I simply mean I would have no interest in participating in a field where a skill set I develeped 20, 10, 5 or even 2 years ago was sufficient to ride into retirement (and I say this from the perspective of one who got into the field over 30 years ago when he was over 30 and, like you, had other professional achievements and skills that made learning anything about computers optional at best)

"If memories was all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck"

(this was my first opportunity to use a Ricky Nelson quote in a UT post. You're welcome <g> )