Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016)

Re:Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016) by ChrisMarshallNY on Thursday December 14, 2023 @09:37PM (#38650511)

There’s the apocryphal tale of The Retired Engineer:

An engineer retires from his company, after a 40-year career. He left at a senior technical level.

Some time later, he’s contacted by his old company, begging him to help them fix a problem that has the current staff absolutely stymied. They have been at a standstill, for weeks.

He agrees, and shows up. He sits down at a workstation, examines the behavior, looks at some code, then says, after about five minutes: “Here’s your problem. If you just do this, it will fix it.”

He hands in an invoice for $10,000.

The beancounters flip their wig. “We can’t pay $10,000 for five minutes’ work! Itemize it, and tell us exactly why you think it’s worth it.”

He takes the invoice, turns it over, and writes on the back:

    1) Fixing the bug in five minutes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 . . . . . . . . . . . .$20
    2) Six years of college, and 40 years of experience, so I can fix the bug in five minutes. . . $9,980

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Re:Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016) by neilv on Thursday December 14, 2023 @11:20PM (#38650949)

A great tale. I usually hear a version about a halted production line, with the punchline invoice something like:

    1. Hit machine with hammer ....... $1

    2. Knowing where to hit it ... $9,999

The production line versions have the element of customer losing money by the minute, which suggests that the customer received the value, and is only confused/petty because it seemed so easy for the engineer to provide that value.

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Re:Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016) by D-Coder on Friday December 15, 2023 @01:28AM (#38651589)

I had heard of this re Charles Steinmetz, but apparently it goes way back:

"The earliest instance located by QI ((Quote Investigator)) appeared in “The Journal of the Society of Estate Clerks of Works” of Winchester, England in 1908.":

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/

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Re:Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016) by marttt on Friday December 15, 2023 @09:15AM (#38654357)

Another version, IIRC true story, from a small European country. A legendary artist and book illustrator (real person) meets a client in a cafeteria. The client says, I want a drawing with this, this and this, and it should carry a feeling of something like this.

The artist takes out a drawing pad and says to the client, would you excuse me for 15 minutes, I need to draw in silence and solitude.

The client leaves and sits to a different table.

After 15 minutes, the artist hands him over the drawing and names a price.

So much? cries the client. This is quite expensive. You only drew for 15 minutes.

Well, says the artist. In order to draw this in 15 minutes, I have been practicing drawing for at least 5 hours every day for the last 50 years.

Absolutely love this story (and the mentioned artist as well, he was a huge inspiration for many).

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