Better on second glance

Rick, back from vacation, invited me to stop by for an overview of the application he supports (and that I had discussed with his Charlotte manager last week). I had thought it wouldn't be a good fit after my talk with her, but it made sense to not be hasty, so we took an hour and I got a closer look at things.

I'm glad I did. His take was that it was definitely something I could handle, although naturally a bit scary at the beginning. The SQL - very complex though it is - works, and I could get up to speed on it (Rick himself, begged off coding the app and they had a contractor do the initial work). But the code is well organized and nicely done at least. Changes are required as needs surface, but it's not a huge amount; I should have time to get acclimated.

The system does run on the mainframe, as I suspected. This is a big leap for my ancient, rusty mainframe expertise (talk about Back to the Future: these things haven't changed since I was 22!). But Rick emphasized that the jobs are all SQL, and you just need to learn the basic concepts of browsing, editing, checking jobs, etc. And (crossing fingers) the system is fairly stable.

So with Rick to lean on, it seems doable. Ah, but there's one other thing - the reason he initiated this: he's found a new job and will be leaving the Bank. As soon as two weeks from now. Talk about diving in and then learning to swim.

So I need to decide. Of course nothing has been offered formally; in fact, his manager doesn't even know he's leaving. But if I go for it, crisis can also mean opportunity. She won't even have time to post his open position before he's gone. So if "any port in a storm" holds true, I might be in the right place at the right time.

Stay tuned.

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