Your Tech Skills Have a Two Year Half-Life 289
itwbennett writes "Eric Bloom, an IT leadership coach and former CIO, has answered that eternal question 'does working on old software hurt your professional marketability' with a somewhat surprising 'no.' But, Bloom adds, 'a techie's skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life. That is to say, that the exact set of skills you have today will only be half as marketable two years from now.'"
I call bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
I still program in Java which I've been doing since 1998. I also sometimes program in Python which I've been doing since 1997. Obviously some things about those languages have changed, but many things haven't.
OO languages are fairly similar to what they were 10 years ago. As is OO design, etc. There have been large changes to frameworks etc, but there is a significant "core skill set" which transfers over.
In my case, my skills have not become become less marketable at all over the last two years. Recently I spent two years out of work (voluntarily), and when I returned to the job market I had no problem whatsoever finding a job.
I think the half-life of skills is more like 15 years.
That long? Optimistic, aren't we? (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, I've been coding QA software in some VB-Form language since 1994. My pay during that time has only increased. This is the first year that I've had to do anything in a C-form language.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that a lot of new technologies are horse puckey. C++ was an actual improvement over C. The .net platform, for all its many faults, has actually increased my productivity, but much of the rest, Windows Presentation Foundation, Python, Ocaml, Ruby, Silverlight, et. al are nifty, but nobody *needs* them. Frankly, if the world standardized on Java tomorrow, and we just used extensions thereof for different platforms and purposes, we could all concentrate on getting useful work done and quit dicking around with learning the latest obscure and allegedly more elegant syntax. The best language and syntax isn't the most logically consistent one, it's the one you know. In productivity terms, human factors trump formal systems elegance every time.
sounds about right (Score:3, Interesting)
This certainly fits my experience. I'm "over 39" and have specific tech skills that date back to the early 80s. Those are worthless. I continued doing highly technical work and staying current into the late 90s, when I went back to school to build up some of my non-technical skills. Not such a good idea as it sounded. I emerged from school several years later with just enough still-marketable skills to land a tech job that offered little opportunity to further advance my skills, then got laid off from that, took a retail job as a life raft.... and now my "freshest" marketable tech skills are a dozen years old, and close to worthless. I guess it's time to get out the paintbrushes and see if I can swing a new career as an artist; at least the half-life on those skills isn't as short.
Re:Depends... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you only admin one product, from one vendor you are a glorified user.
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
It also depends on when you're talking about. After the Dot-Com crash, Java programmers were hurt FAR, FAR worse than C or Fortran programmers. Shortly before Y2K, Fortran and Cobol programmers were in massive demand. (For those who argue Y2K was a hoax because nothing happened, I'd point out that after a large fortune and a larger army of coders went to work on fixing the bugs, you should have EXPECTED nothing to happen. Fixing problems after the disaster is too late.)
So the decay curve isn't a simple one. It has bounces and bottomless pits along the way.
However, and I can't stress this enough, staying current isn't merely a matter of learning the next feature of the old language set. To stay relevant, you MUST diversify. A coder should also be a damn good system admin and be capable of database admin duties as well. Being able to do tech writing as well won't hurt. You don't know what's going to be in demand tomorrow, you only know what was in demand when you last applied for work.
Programmers and systems admins shouldn't specialize on one OS either. As OS/2 demonstrated, the biggest thing out there in week 1 can be a forgotten memory by week 12. The market is slow at some times, fickle at others. You don't know how it'll be, the best thing you can do is hedge your bets. If you've covered (and stay current on) Linux, a BSD Unix variant, a SysV Unix variant, Windows Server, and at least one RTOS (doesn't matter which), you'll know 98% of everything you'll need. You can learn the specific lingo needed by a specific OS implementation quickly because that's only a 2% filler and not a 100% learn from scratch.
Although workplaces don't do sabbaticals (which is stupid), you should still plan on spending the equivalent of 1 study year for every 7 work years. (If you spend 1 hour a day practicing, relearning, or expanding your skills excluding any workside stuff, you're well in excess of what is required. I can't guarantee that an hour a day will make you invulnerable to downturns, but I can guarantee that there will never be a time, even in the worst recession, that your skills aren't in demand.)
IT is more than coders... (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, if you think of IT as just programers, what he is saying makes no reals sense, since staples like C, Java, and
Re:Depends... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure about glorified. Users get to scream when the feature sets change. Admins can't. Users often get to practice in other environments, it's much harder for admins to. Users get to blame admins when things fall over. Admins get to.... ....well, turn into a paranoid, schizophrenic wreck of a human being.
Re:Depends... (Score:0, Interesting)
" (For those who argue Y2K was a hoax because nothing happened, I'd point out that after a large fortune and a larger army of coders went to work on fixing the bugs, you should have EXPECTED nothing to happen. Fixing problems after the disaster is too late.)"
I'm digressing from your actual point, but what would be the null hypothesis for this? Is there any example of businesses that did not put coders to work on this and found significant errors as a result of the date rollover back to 00? As your argument stands, the result 'nothing happened' confirms both claims, so nothing can be determined from it.
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
Half-life is still a pretty damn good analogy.
It is one of those mysterious, non-intuitive things about the subatomic world. You see, rather than ageing uniformly, atoms randomly decide whether to decay or not. Meaning that if you have a container filled with plutonium, after 24,100 years half of the atoms would have decayed, the supply in the container has decayed as a whole, but in reality half of the atoms there never decayed at all.
The result of the analogy is that every two years half of the programmers will be unmarketable (unless they acquire new skills) the other half however doesn't need to learn anything since their exact skill set is still in demand.