MVS TOOLS AND TRICKS OF THE TRADE April 1999 Sam Golob MVS Systems Programmer P.O. Box 906 Tallman, New York 10982 Sam Golob is a Senior Systems Programmer. He also participates in library tours and book signings with his wife, author Courtney Taylor. Sam can be contacted at sbgolob@cbttape.org. Information about the CBT MVS Tapes can be found on the web, at http://www.cbttape.org. AWARENESS Today I'm going to speak about how "aware" we have to be, while we're doing our jobs. To my knowledge, nobody talks about this topic directly. But everybody has great respect for an MVS Systems Programmer (or for anyone else) who is "aware". And by exposing this subject to discussion, I hope to bring information to light, that will help all of us (including myself) become more useful to our employers and clients. Awareness begins with one's job description, and goes on from there. Of course, if you're doing any job, you have to know what your management, or customers, expect from you. This is the minimum job awareness that is expected of anybody. Satisfying the (reasonable) expectations of those who require your services, is the minimum obligation everyone has to fulfill. Those who hire you, have to "get what they pay for". However, one's job description doesn't always accurately say what you REALLY have to do. At many shops, no one will expressly tell you what you really have to do, although they might hint at it. The problem partially comes from "management's" lack of ability to phrase the requirements correctly and put them down on paper. And it partially comes from the fact that you, the technician, have to be aware of more things than anyone else thinks you have to be aware of. For example, many years ago, I worked for an extremely "budget conscious" shop. Our management was under constant, unspoken pressure to run the operation for less money, out of fear of being outsourced. Nobody ever told me specifically that this was supposed to affect what I had to do. We did hear constantly, that there was a threat of our being outsourced. My boss often told me (this was in the mid-80's) that he'd always ask a software salesman the (then) unpopular question of: "How much does this product cost?" I figured out several things from this, without expressly being told: First, I wouldn't ever get any utilities I wanted, unless they were for free. Second, if management could get their hands on a free tool instead of having to buy one, they probably wouldn't mind it. Of course, with a free tool, there's always a "support" question. But the balance would be, that for a utility that wasn't totally essential to the running of the shop, they'd probably rather rely on my support skills, than have to pay any more money. From this situation, I learned that I'd be wise to familiarize myself with the world of free MVS tools, and also to make myself aware of the trends of new MVS system changes within IBM. After all, IBM might put a new feature into MVS, that would spoil the operation of one of our free utilities. I had to know enough, in advance, to anticipate any problems, and get a handle on solving them when they'd come up later. In addition to that, I knew I needed to establish a network of friends, who might be able to "bail us out" when we needed help. We couldn't pay for such help. I knew that "to have a friend, you have to be a friend". So I also prepared myself to help anyone else, from a different shop, who might need my expertise and experience. Besides all of that, I needed, and got, my management's express approval. My boss came to realize that the survival of his shop depended, in part, on the success of my efforts, and he supported me. He let me call systems programmers from other shops during work hours, because he knew that my efforts would eventually decrease our shop's "down time", and it'd enhance his image with upper management when our shop ran well. Vendor products were not left out of my program. I made friends with a lot of third-party software support people, so that if we needed help later from them, it would be quickly forthcoming. My boss let me do many favors for them, such as making tapes of free software for them. Later, I had friends in many places, when I needed them for the "health" of our own shop. None of this was written in my job description. Being "aware" helped to inform me, as to what I had to do. I personally was responsible for our not having to buy several hundred thousand dollars worth of third-party vendor software. During my tenure at that shop, we resisted approximately six outsourcing attempts. Every single time, our management was able to demonstrate that we could run the shop more efficiently, and for less money, than the outsourcing company could. In the process of doing this, I accumulated a lot of experience for myself, which stood me in good stead when I changed companies later, and when I worked as a consultant. Most of my "support friends" from those days, have remained friends of mine to this day. I'm trying to say that you can gain large benefits from being "aware", which will help you personally, as well as helping your current employer or clients. HOW TO BE AWARE Being aware often involves "using your head", "listening to the news", and talking with other people. I've found that you need to be aware about new hardware and software that's not (yet) running at your shop. Many of my friends regularly read the IBM Announcement Letters that are posted on IBMLink or on the Internet at IBM's web site. This keeps them abreast of trends at IBM. A useful source of "news" is the IBM-MAIN newsgroup forum, where you can see people's problems with hardware and software that you may, or may not, be using. You can participate in the newsgroup discussions, or you can just watch what the other folks are saying. Either way, you're sharpening your skills up, and you're making contact with other people. In case you want to know about the IBM-MAIN newsgroup, or other newsgroups in our field, see my past column (April 98) called "Other People's Problems". The network address of IBM-MAIN has changed since then. The list server is at LISTSERV@BAMA.UA.EDU , and the forum itself is at IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU . The Internet has opened up many avenues to finding out more news. Several sites post links to S/390 information sites all over the world. A systems programmer in Belgium, Eric Loriaux, has established a marvelous site to gather all kinds of MVS information links in one place. Eric's US mirror site is at www.loriaux.com , and his main site is at http://www.ping.be/~ping1475 . Our online CBT Tape site, which you can reach from www.naspa.net by clicking on "Online CBT Tape", also has links to many other MVS-related web sites. By starting at these places, you probably can eventually reach almost everywhere else. I've found that SHARE conferences are marvelous, concentrated "awareness centers". They occur twice a year. Winter ones (usually in February) are in a Western city. Summer ones (usually in August) are in an Eastern or Central city. As of this writing, the SHARE conference in San Francisco has just ended, and just from talking to my friends, I can feel the vibrancy and new zest for life, which that conference has generated in them. The SHARE membership requirements have changed, and you can now become a SHARE member by yourself, without relying on your company, and without requiring your running any IBM equipment. (Of course you have to pay the money yourself, too.) But now I am a SHARE member by myself, and I've gotten a lot of benefit from going to several of the conferences as a consultant, without having to rely on another company's SHARE membership. Go to www.share.org for information about SHARE. SHARE conferences provide opportunities for the most concentrated systems programming schooling I've ever seen. It's not automatic. You have to plan which sessions you'll attend, very carefully, and you have to make sure you physically get yourself there. But the opportunities for increasing your awareness can be unequalled. I once took over 55 "random" questions from everybody in my shop, to a SHARE conference. I worked very hard, but I came back from SHARE with authoritative answers (from experts) to every one of them. If I didn't get the answers at a session, I got them from talking to people in the hallway between sessions, or at SCIDS. SCIDS at SHARE is a five-hour evening open ballroom session, where anybody can sit at a table and talk to anybody else. If you have a special interest, some of the tables are marked as belonging to a special interest group. When I had VM questions (as an MVS systems programmer), I'd go to the VM table at SCIDS and ask them there. The same went for anything else. Storage Management has their table at SCIDS. Different databases have theirs, and so forth. SCIDS is an excellent opportunity to go "across fields" or to speak to other people in your own special area of expertise. Besides going to SCIDS at SHARE, there's a "vendor EXPO", and you can talk to all the vendors' representatives directly. At SHARE, you can get "real addresses" and phone numbers of IBM people and others. I always collect everyone's business cards. At SHARE, all the IBM people are allowed to give them out. When you have a difficulty, if you have a real IBM'er to call, or a real person from another vendor, you sometimes can slice through a tough problem in a small fraction of the time it'd normally take to solve. Even one-time SHARE attendance is valuable. But regular attendance is extremely helpful in increasing your awareness. If you have a special concentrated interest, you might spend some of your SHARE time with a committee. SHARE committees are a means of enhancing your own knowledge. But they are also the direct vehicle for affecting IBM. I was once chairman of a committee which we established, to get IBM to modernize Assembler H. Greg Mushial of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) had created many user enhancements to IBM's Assembler H, from source code, and we were trying to get IBM to adopt and support them. At SHARE, in the Assembler Committee, we got together with many like-minded users, vendor developers, and IBM'ers. It was a tough fight, getting IBM to move, but eventually our efforts paid off, and IBM came out with the High Level Assembler for all its S/390 platforms. The entire world is benefiting, and we can really feel that we made the big difference. WHEN TO GROW IN AWARENESS There are many ways to grow in awareness, and you can grow all the time. It pays to be flexible in looking for opportunities. It may be hard for some of us to influence our employers to send us to a SHARE conference. So meanwhile, we can look elsewhere. Internet access is easier, so we can spend time following the links at Eric Loriaux' site and other sites to discover places to explore. Since all the CBT MVS Tape materials are now online, you can download all sorts of user-written code to study and MVS utilities to use. Following the IBM-MAIN discussions is an opportunity, too. It all depends on your taste, and your daily schedule. Here's something that not so many people are aware of. You can grow more aware, just by doing your job. I'll show you why. It's simple. Your employer can't ever take your experience, which you've gained at the job, away from you. Your experience remains yours. Your labor, which they've paid for, is theirs. I like to express this as my "50-50, 100-100 Rule". When you're doing your job at work, your employer and you yourself, split the benefits 50-50. But it's not really 50-50. Your employer gets 100 percent of your work, and you get 100 percent of your experience. So the benefit is really split 100-100. It makes a big difference to think this way. Sometimes an employee can be annoyed at the company, or the boss, for some reason. Is that a cause to stop working? No! If you stop working, you're cutting yourself off from the 100 percent of the new experience that you'd gain simply by doing your job. New experience brings new awareness, and it always makes you a more useful person, valuable to any employer or client, as well as your current one. So, new awareness comes every moment of your working day. However, I, myself, advocate the "looking outward for a fraction of the time" approach. I feel you can't do this job really well, without looking at the world outside. My teacher Jeff Broido drove that idea into me very strongly, during my early years in this trade. And you have to invest some time in it. Your employer will eventually see the return on your personal investment. But you don't have to rely only on your employer seeing it. You'll benefit directly, yourself, from your own efforts, 100 percent of the time. This month, I hope you've benefited from this column. Good luck. We'll see you next month.