filePro Programmer shortage

[Bill Vermillion]

Putting quill to paper and scribbling furiously on Thu, Feb 24 12:57  
Mike Schwartz (PC Support & Services, Appleton, WI) missed achieving immortality when he said: 

> On Thu, February 24, 2005 12:36, Ernie Barnard said:
>
> > And the good thing is that there are not many (or any)
> > unemployed filePro programmers right now. Bad thing is that
> > there may not be enough to go around.

> > Ernie Barnard

>      Yes. I have three clients right now looking for filePro
> programmers; one near Green Bay, Wisconsin and two near
> Chicago, and they haven't been able to find any.

I used to do almost nothing but filePro - and two places had
me working an average of 15 hours/week at each site.

I knew of dozens of places that ran filePro - but one by one
they said "we need a windows environment". One place waited for
2 years after the first announcement of the GUI type environment
then the head of the MIS department decreed that in the future
everything would be on MS product.  

Some of these were fairly complex. One site had me write/run a
program in FP that went over 10 years of payroll and compute
possibly penalties - using the always changing interest rates the
governnment used.  Running on the fastest machines available then
it was a 6 hour run - after working on this daily for about 2 1/2
weeks.

Once it was finally done the data generated was dumped to the
mainframe for final work.  First run had them owing
about $7,000,000.  Using different selection criteria the final
penalty was just about 1 million dollars.

There were some other large sites and many small ones.  That last
time I did any FP work was about 4 years ago with some little
company still running 3.0.  But I still enjoy coming to this list
for all the people I've met here over the past 10-15 years.

While some may be finding a shortage of programmers in this area
I'm seeing a shortage of users.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com