Ted - I must say - your answer is Brilliant! Although it may have seemed obvious to you - it wasn't obvious to me. However, I was feeling a LOT of pressure to give them the kind of response they requested - and now I know WHY - since I was given a nearly impossible task. As you stated, one can NOT truly make a reasonable suggestion without thorough research and review!
Thank you Ed & Stephen for your corroboration - I really appreciate it.
On 3/20/2019 4:28 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 1:45 AM Kurt at VR-FX vrfx@optonline.net wrote:
The second interview is coming up, it's supposed to be this Thursday, but I might try to postpone until Friday. Too much stuff going on in my life lately, including doing 2 different part time jobs and an extended relative who passed away recently,
I'm sympathetic to your situation, but you don't want the wrong interviewer hearing that you're too busy babysitting parrots to interview for a job. That's harsh, and you might not want to work for such a jerk, but you don't want to raise red flags, or even questions, during the interview process...
Actually - during the interv iew process they did ask me what I am currently doing. And, they actually got a kick out of the bird hotel & my teaching work. But, truth is - its the family death that's also having a impact. And, the boss suggested postponing the interview - and I originally said no.
OTOH, you don't want to work for jerks, either. OTOOH, they're paying peanuts and desperate for Fox expertise. Your call,
Your Jerks comment is funny - and I can understand - since the pay is so low. But, I'm not going to say anymore on that topic.
Am rushing to make these replies - then shower & get the hell out of here - since I have a long drive to go between SF & SD - and a deadline about 7pm!
-K-
It looks like UCLA really wants to move away from Foxpro, as they know it's a dead language. But, they want to move to something similar to VFP.
And that's why they are hiring you. I you have an answer during the interview, you'd be jumping the gun. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Your job should be to learn the app, learn what it interfaces with, what it gets for inputs and what it needs to output (PDF, JPEG, XML, JSON, CSV, EBCDIC?) and determine the optimal tool to do all of that and hopefully minimize the transition. It may be really easy to migrate the app to FoxXYZ, but if that can't do what they need, that's useless.
A 30 year's experienced app developer may have some real legacy stuff in their app, and conversion can be a large undertaking. Along with a parallel investigation of what the client needs the app to do is an audit of what the application already does, Whil's Developer Guide went into this in some detail, and I presented a series of lectures with checklists and software for an initial audit.
So, the answer to the question on what they should do is to ask what they want, and what they have? How many lines of code? How many tables? How many fields? Where's the ERD? How many output documents, reports? Where does the data come from? Where does it go? What's the IT infrastructure? What kind of data servers do they support? What kind of maintenance windows are allowed? Where are the users? How do they access the data: PCs, laptops on the road, tablets, phones, embedded in other services? How responsive does the app have to be? What happens in case of failure? What's the backup strategy? What's the disaster recovery plan?
I suspect its also because the 1 and only programmer there, who's
been there for like 30 years and may be retiring soon - doesn't want to learn something Totally new. And, also wants to minimize the transition!
It's likely your job is to learn everything the old Obi-Wan knows and become the new master. Realistically (and perhaps this isn't an interview topic), you'll keep the old app running for some time as you transition the data model, the business model, the services model and the interface(s) to the new platform.
They are asking me to propose what I think is the best option.
When a consultant tells me they have the solution to all of my business needs by replacing a 30-year-old system with whatever they are selling, on the first meeting, sight-unseen, I would be rightfully skeptical.
The right answer is that they need to let you learn the app and research the right solution. If you can convince them you are knowlegeable about what is available, and what the issues are that need to be addressed in a migration, then they should hire you to do your job.
There are a lot of good resources out there, like this list, the FoxWiki, books, whitepapers, but you will need to do the footwork. See if you can convince them to pay you to do that.