Wolfgang-Eberhard Wegner
Travaillez prenez de la peine or to make the best out of it oder Arbeit ist das halbe Leben
This is a description of not a systems but peopleware life cycle of a programmer/systems analyst with over 38 years (at the time of writing this) experience in business computer software. 1965 was still the year of the pioneer with hands-on experience to do and to know everything: Neither design nor programming tools except for the tabulation or the symbolic programming language were available to get to the guts with guts, i.e. wires, magnetic core and transistors (and still some tubes though) of a second generation computer. Information sciences and recognized computer professions were almost non-existent. Business programmers at that time were special accounting clerks with pronunciation on special. In fact very special, because programmers were usually not recruited from Accounting or any other in-house departments but more or less from the street, i.e. the free job market. And I was coming from the street or better from the rail. As a German Railway bureaucrat I was involved in calculating freight costs for wagons going as far as Baghdad. That job was boring and the pay was low, though I managed to finish my daily work in only six hours and half of that time I was waiting for the next bunch of freight papers. Lots of time for thinking what else to do. But what? I had finished school in Berlin when I was 16 and started my apprenticeship at the German Railway in Cologne right after. When I was 18 I became a "certified" Federal Railway Assistant officially being able now to sell tickets and calculating freight for parcels, etc. but nothing else. In other words: I didn't really have a profession and thus couldn't just work for another employer. So, I needed something to learn quickly and also to make more money. After having sorted out the Private Detective (6 month course by mail) I started a course to become a writer. This was pretty soon interrupted (and eventually ended) by a six weeks journey with a free round trip ticket to Damascus by rail in autumn 1963. While I was touring the Near East I stayed in a house of a Syrian industrialist in Aleppo, lived with teachers, doctors and students in Homs, was invited by Saudis in Beirut and visited the Economy Minister of Saudi Arabia with the secretary of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Germany coming from an audience from King Ibn Saud in Vienna. During our many talks I did get offers from Arabs (not the Economy Minister, though) to sell them "Made in Germany" stuff. One of the items was a used Mercedes Benz car personally driven from Germany. Back again I compiled a convoy with two other Germans to do the trip during my vacation the next year with a projected twenty-one thousand Deutschmark profit for three cars as a start. But the whole enterprise was thwarted by falling in love with a girl I couldn't leave alone and who didn't want to join (Kashoggi then started after me and made a fortune). Now I had the strange urge to get settled and to found a family with that down-to-earth and build-a-nest syndrome to look for a more home based and less adventurous job. During summer 1964 I finally found it: A newspaper advertisement of a private evening school in Duesseldorf looking for people to start a new career in computer programming. I was the only one who passed the aptitude test with no errors (might have been a little bit made easy to get a full classroom). Though, I was so enthusiastic about it that I enrolled for the next 26 weeks (4 hours every Thursday) for 50 DEM per week (a lot of money at that time). The course was conducted by moonlighting IBM employees. The only handbook available was the "Reference Manual IBM 1401 Data Processing System" with 252 pages to be sucked in during the 104 hours course. This book really was the bible for this second generation computer (I still have it). It included instructions for hardware maintenance, operating and programming. The programming languages were SPS (Symbolic Programming System) and Autocoder (Assembler like) covering the peripherals card/punch reader, printer, tapes and disks. By the time the 6 months course was finished, I was married, the first child was on its way, and I had a contract with a big Iron & Steel Company in Cologne to start as a programmer on April 1st, 1965. I doubled my salary from about 500 DEM to 1000 DEM a month. The funny thing was that I didn't know anything about the business, had no practical programming experience and didn't undergo any entry examination, neither mental nor physical. Only some personal questions, the salary preference and the starting date were asked during the interview. All my wishes were granted without any discussions. As a matter of fact there were other opportunities with a different hiring philosophy, among those: The IBM laboratories in Southern Germany (Boeblingen) chased me from one aptitude test to the next. They finally decided to hire me but then my wife didn't want to move down south. I was also recommended by one of the IBM instructors to the C&A Company (big garments department store) in Duesseldorf. They really made a fuss by sending me through several exams (including the physical) and interviews. They even inquired my integrity at the president of the Cologne police, beside other celebrities well befriended with my parents in law, who I named to vouch for me on suggestion of my wife. They finally wanted to hire me with a maximum salary of 800 DEM a month, which I did not accept, of course. The Iron & Steel Company has rented the IBM 1401 with only 8K (8000 digits, letters or signs, but the size of a car), a card/punch reader 1402, a printer 1403 and two disk drives 1311. The data processing department consisted of two other programmers, three operators, three punchcards sorting girls and about eight keypunch girls (lots of punchcards shuffling). My first program I wrote was a Sales Report by Country. Because of a lot of intermediate totals and recapitulations each newly encountered problem to be solved let me create another switch in the program. Soon I had to juggle around with a dozen switches. I wasn't considering any structure; I just was eager to get my program running for the first time as quick as possible. It really ran to my surprise after several hardware patches by using the flip/flop switchboard on the Central Processing Unit (every compilation of the program would have taken at least 1/2 hour). The next assignment was a little bigger: A new Cost Accounting System for the head office and all affiliates. The accounting manager designed the input/output data layouts, the IBM systems engineer gave technical support and I was responsible for the in-betweens. But this time I was trying to avoid any cumbersome switches and programmed some kind of a top to down structure by using a lot of subroutines. The IBM man did like the way this was done so much that he hired me for 1600 DEM a month for a Harvesting Machine Company, where he previously just became the Data Processing Manager, starting March 1st, 1967. In the meantime my monthly salary at the Iron & Steel Company increased to 1200 DEM. Confronted with higher pay offered at the other company they wanted even to pay 1400 DEM. But it wasn't only the money. I wanted to learn more in another environment. This time it was an IBM 1440 computer. The major difference was a better and programmer friendlier CPU panel. Though the next generation computer, the IBM 360, was already ordered for which I had attended all the IBM courses (COBOL in Munich, Assembler in Stuttgart, RAG in Cologne, Operating System in Berlin) during the year 1966. My assignment at the new company now was the tailoring and implementation of the IBM product programs BOMP (Bill Of Material Processor) and MINCOS (Material Inventory Control System). However, my employment at that Company didn't last long. On May 31, 1967 I flew to New York and started as a programmer at Lufthansa, the German Airline. This was not all of a sudden but had a short history: In autumn 1966 I read an advertisement of a "German affiliate in New York" looking for a programmer. I sent my resumé to the cipher code address. Two months later I did get an invitation from Lufthansa for an appointment in Frankfurt. After the interview and a programming test I haven't heard anything for almost another 2 months, only to be told after that I was considered and asked me to be patient. Finally the offer came end of February 1967 to work for a salary of 800 USD a month (3200 DEM at that time) at the North America Head Office in New York. Later I heard that I was selected out of 81 applicants, that was the reason why it took so long. Getting all the immigration papers lasted another three month. I could have stayed with my old Iron & Steel Company but the Harvesting Machine Company needed me desperately (as they said) even if I could only work there for about two to three months what I did. Now New York: I rented a furnished flat in Queens and one month later I flew back to Germany to pick up my family (our daughter was almost two years old). Lufthansa had the IBM 1440 with 12K and 2 tape drives and 4 disk drives. My first program was a complicated (because it had to be fast and short) standard utility flight schedule by day/date derived from the weekday number. After the installation of the IBM 360/30, the third generation computer, and attending another advanced COBOL language course at IBM in Philadelphia I designed and programmed a Sales Statistic Reporting System in COBOL. My next assignment was the project leader of the Group Reservation System (for the many Americans touring Europe in week or two). In supporting the decision whether Lufthansa should switch from COBOL to PL/1, an IBM programmer created a PL/1 program for a specific business case and I wrote a COBOL program. The outcome was that Lufthansa stayed with COBOL. I also saved Lufthansa from the wrong decision to rent a cheaper RCA instead of an IBM computer, because of the result of the parallel runs I scrutinized at RCA in Cherry Hills, New Jersey (RCA eliminated his computer division soon after). My salary increased to 1000 USD a month. For the flights I only paid 10 % of the regular airfare. We flew to Florida, Kenya, South Africa, several times to Germany and around the world. The second daughter was born just a couple of months before that last trip, so I had to travel alone. That was the last chance to make it (not in 80 but 18 days) with Lufthansa, because I was looking for another job again (Lufthansa was almost as bureaucratic and autocratic as the German Railway; Americans only stayed six month on the average; the programming supervisor was called Little Hitler). And looking for another job was easy. Since I had the green card (immigration card) I could work for almost every Company everywhere in the United States. The private employment agencies were doing all the work (paid by the Employer on hiring) to find the right job (they even call you up for another job every year, when they think that you have already stayed too long with your current employer). I was called up for interviews on their premises when they had gathered several representatives of interested employers. Two of several prospective employers were Doubleday and Avon. But I decided for MOAC (Marine Office Appleton & Cox), Insurance Company, in Maiden Lane near Wall Street. I was hired as a supervising programmer/analyst for a salary of 1250 USD a month (increased after a year to 1400 USD) and commenced my employment on February 16, 1970. The computer was still the IBM 360/30 with tape and disk drives. My predecessor has left the Company with his crew from one day to the next with a lot of mess behind. I hired and fired until I had five medium to good programmers together: One black from Surinam, one Chinese girl, one American of German origin, one Italian-American Vietnam veteran and one Italian-American dandy. I was solely responsible for my people. If something went wrong I was blamed, because I didn't hire, train, and motivate the right people (and did not fire the turned out wrong ones). This was Company policy supported by one of the best management training programmes like "The Art of Supervision" with recorded role-plays and real live follow-ups. My next superior was the vice president of Systems and Procedures. Meetings were mostly business lunches (in the best restaurants in the Wall Street area) with managers of our own Conglomerate, Re-insurers, Insurance Systems co-operators (for example General Motors for overseas car shipments), IBM and other hardware/software vendor representatives. Discussions were conducted with ease resulting in fast and mostly right decisions (despite or because after several American Martinis or Manhattan Cocktails?). Business travel to our affiliates in the States was always first class (I only made it to Chicago). Besides travelling around and having business lunches I also worked, or let's say I delegated as much as I could (mostly to my best programmer/analyst , the Chinese girl) in order to get home on time (that's actually what I have been inoculated by my employer that only bad managers stay longer to get their job done). I even had spare time to program some internal Disk Operating System (DOS) software utilities in Assembler language and to implement new DOS releases, so that I never lost touch to the technical side of computers and thus knew "my computer" inside out. This changed early 1972 when our Conglomerate founded a new Computer Company called INSCO to consolidate all data centers into a new headquarter in Neptune, New Jersey, one-hour drive from downtown Manhattan. However, my people and I temporarily moved to our parent Continental Insurance Company in an old-fashioned building in Maiden Lane (today they are located in a new modern skyscraper opposite the South-Sea-Port). Here I tried to be busy with the transplant of our systems into the newly established Computer Center in Neptune as long as possible. The reason was that we (more so of my wife's homesickness) have planned to go back to Germany in August 1972, when our eldest six year old daughter was due to commence school there. Only later, back in Germany, I realized what I have missed: A nice house with all its amenities in a good neighbourhood in New Jersey, close to the beach, a couple of minutes to work and that in a high-tech environment I later dreamt of. The INSCO headquarter was brand new (and close enough to the beach boardwalk for the lunch-break stroll) with its own power backup system in case of a blackout, with the most modern computers protected and secured behind screened walls and connected via telecommunication lines to its affiliate Companies located all over the States. It also conducted most of the training in-house and had a well-equipped library. And last not least: many of the new colleagues were real professionals with a lot of enthusiasm and fun to work with. Now back to Germany (in a double sense): Looking around for a job, i.e. visiting those German Companies who answered my job application before I left the States. One of those: the Ford Motor Company in Cologne. But that's another story I probably dare to write after my retirement.
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