This reminds me of back when I had a regular full-time job before I retired.

Back around 2004 there was a push to migrate several major mainframe application suites to "another platform" and Windows was chosen. This was put under the direction of a 3rd party consulting company, and "fire one" was "Let's do all of this in C#!"

The full-time programmers were sent to 3rd party training, teaching Microsoft's official curriculum. These were 4 and 5 day intensive courses with labs using Microsoft's training materials. The idea was for the staff to work with the vendor during the "porting" process and take over maintenance once conversion was complete.

The progress was amusing.

The full-time ASP.Net guys came in cocky, but they failed to complete the first 4-day course!

The VB.Net "desktop" guys made it through the first course, struggled with the second, and failed to complete the third course.

The old-timer Cobol guys struggled with the first course, then aced the second and third. A couple of former systems programmers with multilanguage background being retreaded as application developers were able to sleepwalk right through all three courses.

Then the conversion project smashed right into a wall after two years of effort. It got about 1/10th of the way along in that time and the users and testers got totally fed up with the poor performance of this system, front-ended with Ajaxy ASP.Net, middle in C#, and SQL Server as the database.

It just couldn't cut it... at all. Even with a load of 10 users!

Back to the drawing board, and a year later the vendor came back. Now they proposed a fatter-client approach using VB.Net, discarding ASP.Net for anything but a few minor public-facing interactions.

No training this time. The vendor would do 90% of the conversion with a new team, and the local guys were told to just keep up.

The ASP.Net guys were worthless, and the VB.Net guys were removed from the project and sent back to maintain their existing code. Only some of the Cobol and formerly-systems folks were involved in the programming, and everyone else was forced to do little but unit testing.

The last I heard... even this many years later only a small fraction of the job was done, working as a parasite on the existing mainframe suite. This vast waste of money, effort, and time has made the newspapers a number of times.


What does this show?

The language doesn't make the man, the man makes the language. It is far less about the tools than the workman.