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The Midrange Manager: What's in Your Budget for Next Year?

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If an average, experienced RPG programmer is earning $65,000 (Midwest region with 7+ years experience), that comes to approximately $32.50 per hour. While managers should encourage developers to play in the sandbox from time to time (see The Midrange Manager: Playing in the Sandbox), it makes good financial sense to supply them with simple tools that provide capabilities that are not offered on the system.

Some tools, such as DBU, contain a single diverse and powerful tool that is essential to day-to-day productivity; others, such as TAA Tools, are a bit more elaborate and contain several valuable nuggets.

If we consider the cost of these tools in terms of programmer productivity, we find that it is often very affordable to budget for these types of software packages simply because of the savings they provide. Let's consider a mythical $1,000 programmer productivity software tool. At $32.50 per hour, your programmers would only need to save about 30 hours of work to pay for the tool. However, if they've spent that time reinventing the wheel, you've not only spent the $1,000, you've also lost 30 hours of valuable programming time. And that's if just one programmer attempted to create part of the function of just one tool.

It only makes sense to budget for these types of tools and for periodic upgrades. You don't want your developers constantly writing a field-where-used utility when something like ASC's Abstract will provide that functionality for you.

Today's software utilities and tools are highly refined packages that perform a wide range of functions. Gone are the days of the maverick programmer who threw together a quick and dirty utility to print a listing from the outfile produced by the DSPPGMREF command. That kind of stuff is what your staff needs to be writing. But when it comes to productivity software--such as DBU, Abstract, RPG Toolkit, or TAA Tools--you really need to consider budgeting for those software packages. These and other packages can save you money more quickly than you thought. You do the math!

Bob Cozzi has been programming in RPG since 1978. Since then, he has written many articles and several books, including The Modern RPG IV Language--the most widely used RPG reference manual in the world. Bob is also a very popular speaker at industry events such as COMMON and RPG World and is the author of his own Web site, www.rpgiv.com, and of the RPG ToolKit, an add-on library for RPG IV programmers. Bob runs his own one-man iSeries consulting and contract programming firm in the Chicago area.


BOB COZZI

Bob Cozzi is a programmer/consultant, writer/author, and software developer. His popular RPG xTools add-on subprocedure library for RPG IV is fast becoming a standard with RPG developers. His book The Modern RPG Language has been the most widely used RPG programming book for more than a decade. He, along with others, speaks at and produces the highly popular RPG World conference for RPG programmers.

MC Press books written by Robert Cozzi available now on the MC Press Bookstore.

RPG TnT RPG TnT
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The Modern RPG IV Language The Modern RPG IV Language
 Cozzi on everything RPG! What more could you want?
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