The IBM i And Its RPG Decade Of Crisis
September 29, 2021 Roger Pence
Your business desperately needs your IBM i RPG applications to deliver your unique business value to your customers and business partners. RPG programming is a disappearing skill; by 2030 the typical RPG programmer will be 80 years old. Your RPG-dependent business is at risk with the disappearance of RPG programming talent.
The IBM i runs many businesses today and its RPG applications perform unique and mission-critical processes. These businesses can’t get along without them. Alas, the teams that built these applications are rapidly nearing retirement. There aren’t younger RPG programmers in the pipeline. RPG programming is a disappearing skill. Despite IBM’s best efforts to extend the life and capabilities of the IBM i platform, the fact remains that RPG applications need RPG programmers to persist. The decade between 2020 and 2030 is the decade of crisis for many IBM i shops. Can your business survive without its RPG programmers?
RPG programming talent and the skills it takes to maintain and enhance RPG applications will be nearly obsolete in 2030. Don’t be mistaken: We are not saying the IBM i will be obsolete in 2030. We are saying that by 2030 programmers with RPG programming skills will be very hard to find. And without RPG programmers, businesses that depend on RPG applications will be in jeopardy. IBM i-based businesses that ignore or fail to understand the impact of losing their RPG programming teams put the business persistence in direct risk.
The Risk Is Real
Consider the plight of New Jersey and its recent search for COBOL programmers. A 1,600 percent increase in unemployment claims during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis overwhelmed New Jersey’s 40-year-old COBOL system. This caused New Jersey governor Phil Murphy to put out an urgent plea for COBOL programmers. Oklahoma also had a similar issue.
During a press conference (saying “COBALT” but meaning “COBOL”) Murphy said, “but given the legacy systems we should add a page [to the team’s planning] for COBALT (sic) computer skills, because that’s what we’re dealing with in these legacy [systems]. . . . But literally, we have systems that are 40-plus years old. There’ll be lots of post mortems and one of them on our list will be how the heck did we get here when we literally needed COBALT programmers.” (See him say this in the last minute of this video.)
It’s Not Just New Jersey
New Jersey’s COBOL shortage is solid evidence that dependence on legacy languages is a critical issue. It’s not just New Jersey, either. This June 2019 report from the United States Government Accountability Office shows that of the federal government’s $90 billion budget, about 80 percent of it is aimed at keeping its legacy systems running. The report concludes that the government’s legacy systems need substantial upgrades and replacements and until they do that they risk higher costs, delays, and project failure. The report cited five examples of successful federal modernization initiatives that included transforming legacy code into a modern programming language and moving that transformed code to the cloud.
This business challenge is not COBOL-specific. COBOL and RPG both appeared in their first rudimentary forms in 1959. In the coming years, many IBM i shops will be without RPG programmers. Don’t be in the same boat as New Jersey and the US federal government. The IBM i/RPG reckoning isn’t here yet, but it’s coming.
Several years ago, a forward-thinking customer of ours said it better than we can: “While our RPG application had served us well for more than 20 years, we realized that it represented a deep investment and dependency in an application that would be unmaintainable by next-generation programmers. We needed to take steps to ensure unimpeded business continuity.”
Delivering Core Business Value
Like the System/38, the AS/400 offered an operating system tightly integrated with its database and its computer languages. This made the AS/400 a good platform for creating business applications in the 1990s. Back then, business applications were relatively simple (especially when compared to today’s networked applications that need to offer deep integration with customers and business partners). Without much formal training, budding RPG programmers created very effective RPG applications. In those days, security, cross-platform integration, a sophisticated user interface, and many features so common and necessary today simply weren’t even on the nice-to-have list, let alone the need-to-have list.
Those were simple days. The core demand back then was to automate decades-old paper-driven systems. The imagination, the computer power, and the tools didn’t exist to design and develop the kinds of applications we needed today. The $230,000 top-end AS/400 in 1988 had 96 MB of memory (that’s not a typo – 96 megabytes of memory). An iPhone today has at least 1 GB of memory. Your phone has enough memory to power ten AS/400s from 1988! Who would have thought then that in 40 years we would all have more powerful computers in our pockets and purses than we had in our AS/400s?
In many cases, the applications RPG programmers built back then predated the AS/400 and started on IBM’s System/38. Upon its introduction, the AS/400 was just more scalable and slightly tweaked System/38. For most System/38 shops the upgrade path to the AS/400 was smooth and obvious. The old RPG needed only minor change to run just fine on the AS/400.
In many shops, these young, and mostly self-taught, RPG programming teams built what would ultimately become the core IT backbone of the business, and now 30 or 40 years later, these applications are still ensuring that your business is able to deliver its unique business value to its customers. These applications are critical and the business simply can’t get along without them. They are managing unique and business-specific complex processes and workflows.
There may indeed be some generic aspects of this RPG software that could be factored out. For example, some might include a general-purpose general ledger or accounts payable. However, even after factoring these more generic applications out, the remaining application is still huge by any measure and critical to business persistence.
Consider that 76 percent of the respondents to the 2021 IBM i Marketplace Survey said that their IBM i business applications are “homegrown applications.” In nearly every case, these are the bedrock applications created by RPG teams all those years ago. Most probably had their genesis in solving a couple of very simple business challenges and over the years the application grew into this pervasive monolith that governs most, if not all, aspects of the business. These RPG applications are critical and your business simply can’t get along without them managing your unique and business-specific complex processes and workflows.
Goodbye, Boomer
Baby Boomer years are generally considered to have been from 1946 to 1964. Many, if not most, RPG programmers are baby boomers. At the end of the new decade, 2030, baby boomers will be from 66 to 84 years old! By the end of decade, even the youngest boomer will be 66 years old.
By 2030 nearly all available RPG talent will have retired. The RPG talent still available in 2030 will be very hard to find and expensive when you do find it.
Figure 1. Most RPG programmers will be retired by 2025.
The IBM i was introduced in 1988. There were probably some 20 year-olds (or so) new to RPG programming at that time, so not all RPG programmers are boomers. However, even an 18-year-old who came on board in 1988 will be 60 in 2030.
Let’s generalize a little and assume that today’s typical IBM i RPG programmer was born in 1950. That makes that typical RPG programmer 80 years old in 2030. Many boomers today are working beyond the traditional US retirement age of 65, but very few are working past 80. By 2030, nearly all available RPG talent will have retired. And for any IBM i-centric business deeply dependent on its RPG applications that is a huge problem.
That’s bad news but it gets worse. Not only is this generation of RPG programmers on the cusp of retirement, young programmers haven’t, and won’t, enter the RPG pipeline. Programming/IT college graduates today are highly unlikely to have encountered either the IBM i or RPG in any of their academic studies. The IBM i and its RPG programming language simply aren’t on young programmers’ radar today. Most IBM i shops with an RPG dependence have a crisis coming very soon.
Offshore outsourcing may offer some respite to the RPG programmer shortage. However, not only does using offshore outsourcing dramatically change your RPG maintenance/enhancement workflow, it imposes substantially communication challenges, cultural considerations, and a general imposition on your RPG programming comfort zone.
What’s A Business To Do?
Your RPG source is your business’s most important asset. Without that RPG source and the applications it creates, your business cannot deliver its unique value to your customers. At ASNA, we can show you how you can use that RPG source to transform your legacy RPG application into a modern, responsive alternative that a generation of younger programmers can maintain and enhance. Learn more about ASNA’s approach to avoiding your own crisis decade here.
Roger Pence has been a product specialist with ASNA for 20 years. He has been involved with the IBM i midrange community for many years. He has written many articles about the IBM i and RPG.
This content is sponsored by ASNA.
“In many shops, these young, and mostly self-taught, RPG programming teams ” and “Programming/IT college graduates today are highly unlikely to have encountered either the IBM i or RPG in any of their academic studies”
These are both directly taken out of the article. I am not a young RPGLE programmer, but I was not taught in my college courses about it and learned on the job, just as countless others did and will CONTINUE to do! That RPG programmers will be a thing of the past is baloney. They will magically appear as the demand is there and they learn on the job, just as I did about RPG and the wonderful operating system it is part of called IBMi. By the way IBMi is not taught in colleges either and future people will learn it the way I did, on the job.
I admire your optimism, but, respectfully, think it is misplaced. I do agree, though, that if new RPG programmers do appear, it will be by magic!
What is IBM’s answer ?
I agree with Roger. I’m a boomer myself that spent a decade or two coding RPG. My name was somewhat know in that community. Now I’m on a Ruby and Rails team lead by another name that was known: Aaron Bartell. Aaron is still a kid (at 40-something) but he left RPG behind as well.
It was coupled with ibms ‘mini’ comps that meant companies didnt need a star trek set up to create purchase orders. Matching records, look ahead, half adjust, packed blanks and the 64k overflow were all part of the fun.
I am a boomer as well – working on S/38 on my first job out of college in the early 80’s. I learned RPG3 on the job. The languages I learned in school were COBOL, Assembler, Fortran, Basic, SQL, RPG1 and a few others. The RPG1 did nothing to prepare me for RPG3. I studied the RPG manual, took a CBT course and read Q38. I was fortunate that a S/38 shop was willing to take on a programmer with no experience and pay me to learn and eventually be productive.
Later I worked for the largest AS/400 consulting company in the country. I think just about all of us were self taught. I don’t think IBM had set up their AS/400 classes in the community colleges yet. Today, IBM i shops looking for developers require 10 years of experience in RPG, CL, SQL, Java, Web Services, SalesForce, JDE, ERP, SQL Server, Python and whatever they have in their environment. And there may be some “younger” experienced programmers that fit that bill that are willing to change jobs. The point is that most companies are not willing to invest in new programmers to give them on the job training in IBM i technologies. With the newest free format RPG I don’t see why a person coming out of college couldn’t use the programming skills they learned to transition fairly quickly to this language. Especially now that a Google search can tell you how to write a subfile program. It is also possible that programmers coming out of college might not want to get into IBM i technologies. But I wonder if they were offered some decent money and career path that it might change their minds.
This 60yr old RPG developer with 41 years experience waved goodbye to RPG a couple of months ago, to embark on a new career as a web developer (JavaScript & React)! I plan to retire at about 95 (just when I’m getting the hang of JS!)
That’s the spirit!
They were calling the end of RPG in the 1970s. I know because I was there. I remember in the late 1970s they told us that the language of the future was PL/I. Then they told us in the 1980s, the C Language would replace RPG. Then there was Microsoft’s Midrange Alliance(despite the fact Gates was still AS400s himself). In the late 1990s, IBM ran its ads claiming that if RPG programmers did not learn Java, we RPG programmers would all be flipping burgers.
The offshore companies in India are seeing a real opportunity here. In India, they are training thousands of RPG programmers. These guys will have to learn a lot legacy code to be effective, but the latest All Free RPG on a Power System with GIU tools is a modern development platform; plus, on the Power System you have access to IFS, Linux and AIX. On Power System when it is time to upgrade, it is one call to one vendor and it is plug and play. In the Windows world. when it is time to upgrade ‘plug and pray.”
Ask yourself this question: If RPG was not meeting the needs of the business community would it have lasted this long?
Want young people to learn RPG? Put the money out there and the talent will follow