plonq | Oh boy, a new project.

"OK team, in a nutshell, we are going to be modernizing our revenue and costing analysis system. We will want to bring in revenue and non-revenue carload and intermodal billing, match it to fuel consumption and labour costs and then give the ability to mix and match the data against tonnage and miles over segments, divisions, subdivisions, regions and corridors, splitting it between logical internal corporate entities. Some of this will be coming from the mainframe, some from SAP BW, some from SQL Server, and the rest will be in ASCII flat files. You will need to figure out how to retrieve this date, how to ETL it into a usable form, develop a set of common keys and then populate the data back two years - though preferably seven. By the way, one of these systems only retains records for 45 days. The mainframe data will come out as EBCDIC."

"OK then, I guess we all know what our project is going to be for the year. When do they need, this, Q4? Q1 of 2017?"

"Actually, there are some changes coming to federal regulations, so they will need this all completed for the end of next month..."

A couple of very seasoned developers have tossed out the word insanity for the scope and time-line of this project.

By the way, we're hiring. $50K a year. All you need is a pulse. The downside that you'd have to move to Winnipeg.