Jobs rare, but still there
March 16, 2007
3000 customers and community members report that most of the new jobs for the platform involve migration assistance. Knowing the HP 3000 seems to be of greatest value, consultants say, when you're helping a company move away.
But there are still homesteading jobs out on the employment boards. You have to look harder or wait longer for them to appear. A longstanding success like the HP 3000, however, will retain a customer base longer, too.
Monster.com, one of the biggest job sources on the Web, offered one such position this week:
Customer is looking for two experienced contractors with skills in HP3000, COBOL, JCL and Turbo Image Database. Candidates will write program specifications and submit for review. They will conduct code walkthroughs, and create test plans and test cases for the programs.
The job is in Walnut Creek, Calif. Being a suburb of Silicon Valley, the town also hosts the headquarters of Long's Drug, which was once the single biggest user of HP 3000s other than HP. But we don't know if this position — a full-time temporary/contract job — is at Long's. It doesn't even matter than the employer prefers to hire Bay Area candidates.
What matters is that we can still find companies that need to reinvest in and refresh their HP 3000 resources. The job skills in this posting could come right off a to-do list for any of the last 10 years of a 3000 expert's career:
They will perform coding testing and system testing of batch COBOL and JCL. COBOL programs many involve interface to TurboIMAGE databases.
And if there ever was an apt description of the 3000's status in many companies, we'd say "full-time temporary" covers the situation well.