Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions

July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.

“What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to ABC Manufacturing. I’ll steal his developer.’ Then someone would move in there, and it was just like musical chairs. And today, you can’t do that.”

The North American IBM i installed base has shrunk quite a bit over the past quarter century, and an AS/400 job market that was large and vibrant at the turn of the century is now a fraction of the size that it once was.

That shrinking job market may have masked the decline in new workers entering the IBM i job market, as RPG programmers who left companies that migrated off the IBM i found new jobs at the companies that remained on the IBM i. But as the rate of migrations off the IBM i platform declined over the past 10 years and the installed base has stabilized, the lack of new human resources in IBM i-land has come to the forefront.

The IBM i job market was a finite resource back in the day, Buck said. “But it was a large finite resource,” he said in an interview with IT Jungle at the recent COMMON POWERUp 2024 conference in Fort Worth, Texas. “Today, that isn’t there anymore. And then when you find [an RPG programmer], he doesn’t have the skills. Well, he’s got the skills you need if all your code is old.”

And if you luck out and find somebody who actually has the RPG IV free-form skills – along with knowledge of Java, PHP, Node, SQL, APIs, and modern DevOps techniques? Well, then he’s a unicorn, and “you can’t afford him anyway,” said Michelle Lyons, imPower Technologies’ chief operating officer.

The real problem isn’t so much a lack of new blood in the IBM i community, but a lack of creative thinking by IBM i shops, Lyons said: Instead of finding an existing RPG programmer fully formed in the wild, you can create your own, right inside of your company.

“We need fresh bodies,” Lyons said. “But the problem has been that you want to go out and find an RPG programmer, whereas you can find somebody who has everything else, and we teach them RPG.”

The truth of the matter is that no RPG programmer has ever spontaneously sprung from the earth ready to lay down flawless ILE code (except perhaps for Liam Allan). They all were something else before they “became” RPG programmers. It’s a subtle shift in thinking, but the approach could yield enormous benefits for IBM i shops who are struggling to put together a lineup card.

“It’s the mindset,” Lyons said. “But they don’t think that way. They can find a kid out of school who has a degree, or someone who works in accounting who knows the business, or someone with Web skills, and then just plug in RPG.”

Since the COVID pandemic shut down in-person learning, imPower Technologies has moved to a fully virtual format. Students can study at their own pace for each lesson, up to a maximum of eight weeks. The company offers four courses – IBM i Concepts & Operations, Programming in ILE RPG, RDi & Modular Programming, and SQL Queries Workshop – and could add more (Buck says it could be COBOL).

imPower Technologies, of course, is not the only game in town when it comes to IBM i education. Manta Technologies also provides IBM i training, and COMMON is another great resource. Many IBM i professionals get training at regional IBM i user groups, like OCEAN, which is holding its TechCon24 conference in two weeks.

IBM also is working to expand IBM i and RPG curriculum at four-year universities through its Power Skills academy, and there have been some early successes. Northwestern State University in Louisiana recently committed to teaching IBM i courses, and the hope is there will be more colleges and universities coming on line.

The free market is also responding to the need for RPG programmers. In February, we told you about an Evergreen, Colorado, trucking industry outsourcer, DDC FPO, that started an RPG training program in the Philippines. The company is committed to training RPG programmers in classes of 12 to 15 students, with several classes per year.

But IBM i shops don’t have to wait until colleges or trucking industry outsourcers start cranking out RPG programmers by the dozen. Companies can get started by training their existing workers with all of the IBM i educational resources.

Teaching your existing workers how to program RPG isn’t as big of a shift as you might think. In the old days, RPG programmers often came from the line of business. They were forklift operators, salespeople, or accountants who expressed an interest in programming and learned the trade through on-the-job training.

For instance, Buck grew up in a farming community and got introduced to programming while working at a refrigerator manufacturing company that was running COBOL Amdahl mainframes. “I got hired in as a third shift operator, shoving cards in eight hours a day. Man, I had some arms on me back then! Trays were heavy,” he said.

“You could be putting screws in the back of a refrigerator on Friday and you could be on a programming job and start programming on Monday. There wasn’t really any training for it. They trained you in the shop,” he said.

As companies build their IBM i team for the future, they could do very well for themselves by learning a lesson from the past and investing in their own farm system. It will not only build company loyalty and spread institutional knowledge, but IBM i shops also won’t be as dependent on signing that expensive free agent/unicorn, who will be gone the day she gets a better offer.

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