Hey all, long time no see. I was just accepted as a student to the Howard Hughes School of Engineering and am now working toward my BA, mabee in Informatics, but certainly in Computer Science. I contacted the Vice President of IT operations at The Venetian to find out what they need in programmers and technicians, and he said that RPG programmers are very hard to find and can start at 100K on the strip. He had offered me a job in IT when I was a locksmith there a few years ago, so I called him because I wanted some direction in my classes.

He told me that the top paying positions are RPG Programmers or i Systems for the AS/400 IBM series, Network administrators and Database managers.

.Net programmers are in comparison making about 45k to 60k

Anyway, I am looking for RPG or iSystem resources. I have already found a couple but am looking for as many as possible. Any feedback is appreciated.


P.S. RPG in this case means Report Generating Programming not Role Playing Games

This post has been edited by KeyWiz: 23 Aug, 2008 - 09:41 AM

Well there isn't a whole lot out there on RPG because isn't a huge market (which is why you can make so much at it). Its roots come out of the era when COBOL was big as well. Just to give you a time frame here.

You can find a book called "Introduction to RPG IV" which might give you a good start at using that language for report generating.

You can also find some RPG tutorials and such online like at the link below...

RPG Tutorial - Tutorial India (Be sure to skip past the ad)

There is also an RPG guide from IBM located at the link...

ILE RPG Programming Guide from IBM

As for i Systems, you might as well as start at the IBM page itself which will tell you about it and the suite of applications under this umbrella term...

IBM System i Access Home Page

Hopefully this gives you a good start.

Your numbers may be misleading. In all areas of IT, seniority means more money. A junior programmer can make a pittance, ten years later they can make closer to the end of the scale. I would suspect anyone still doing RPG has been in the industry for some time ( and is most likely about to retire .)

Even the big guys who that swore mainframes would never die are replacing legacy systems with more modern alternatives at every turn. RPG programmers are usually maintaining dinosaurs that are slogging along, living in fear of the day when some part of the barely understood system mysteriously stops working.

I wouldn't recommend anyone get into the game of what amounts to computer life support, no matter what the enticements.

Thanks for the info, since I am considered somewhat of a dinosaur myself I believe I will seek this line, since The Vice President of IT for the Largest Resort in the world recomends it and this is where I live and my wife works there I believe adding this to my repitoir can only help me not hurt. But by all means you young whipersnappers should stay out of the game, leaves more for me, as they say!

Well I think what baavgai and I are politely saying is that it may go the way of the do do so to speak. You may be in demand now, but if they are changing over systems you will have wasted time learning something that is no longer in demand. Just be careful when getting into a market that is potentially on its way out or you will be back here in a couple years asking us about another industry you could work in.

Just a word of caution. Protect yourself and make sure you diversify your skills and don't lean too much into RPG.

I would agree with Martyr2 that you definitely want to diversify your skills.

However, I would disagree that RPG is on its way out, at least for the foreseeable future. I realize, Martyr2 and bavaagi, that you didn't specifically say that as much as implied it. One of the major strengths of RPG is its stability, which exceeds any Windows or *nix based system in comparison. In addition, besides the difficulty in learning to program initially, it is very easy to use and program once you have acquired the skills.

Typically, AS/400's are used on the back end and are interfaced using newer OO languages.

It is a great skill to have, one that I am proud to have added to my skill set and I am a .NET programmer. Demand is still very strong for RPG programmers and will remain so due to the lack of skilled programmers to replace those old dinosaurs.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.