It has been a year and a half now of me coding again. I can honestly say it has been a steep learning curve, but fun and exhilarating.
The question that haunts me when I have 10 minutes to think about all the things I have learned is: “How do we get all the people like me to move?”.
I have a fairly unique position in that it is my job to dig into new paradigms, approaches and languages. But there is a whole SAP industry out there whose job it was and is to write RICEF’s (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Enhancement and Forms). They are busy 40 hours a week of delivering on projects and have very little time to catch up on new functionality. The most they learn is the 6 new commands that were added to ABAP.
That whole community, the thousands of them, might struggle to make the jump without a major re-education of certain concepts such as:
- Storage of code in a repository that is not internal to SAP
- CI/CD – Continuous Integration and Delivery
- Cloud approaches such as Blue Green Deployments
- Containerization
- … and others
I don’t have the answer, but it is a question that keeps me thinking.