Skills Needed For a Future In IT 258
Lucas123 writes "An increase in the pace of change in IT has created new dynamics for jobs involving the Web, mobile computing and virtualization. For those looking to enter the marketplace in years to come, 30-somethings hoping to upgrade their skills, or those who'll be winding their careers down by 2020, skill sets are drastically changing. For example, graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period — the average shelf life of most game platforms. 'We've never seen anything like it in any industry.' Colleges are in continual catch-up mode and have only recently added project management and soft skills training to computer science programs. According to one expert, 'They're about five years behind where they need to be.'"
Most companies (Score:4, Interesting)
It's college. (Score:3, Interesting)
College is not supposed to be vocational training. College ensures a good foundation, and hopefully some work ethic and study skills. Nobody comes out of college knowing everything they need to do their job. They come out of college knowing everything they need to be readily trained.
Mundane Society (Score:3, Interesting)
The last thing we need is for mundane society to catch up with the trend...
Yes, what he said. Please, for the love of God, do not spread knowledge! Keep us elites strong, and let the masses rot! The last thing we want is an economy that can keep up. When the ship goes down, I want to be the rat sitting on the tallest mast.
Re:Five years behind? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called "learning the basics". It's not like we're dealing with quantum computers yet. The basic principles that worked 20 years ago are still applicable today. It's just bloody hardware folks. Yes, there are some newer concepts, or rather old concepts pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s are finally being put into gear. But for a guy like me, who does network administration, WTF do I care how many cores the GPU has? If someone needs to do some big-time 3D modeling, okay, I'll do a bit of reading, figure out where the best bang for the buck (or whatever metric I'm told to use), and recommend its purchase.
I mean, we've just started rolling out Windows 7 in the last couple of months on some new workstations, and it's close enough to Vista that I haven't heard anyone go "OMG! WTF is that?!?!?" In the networking world, we're just looking at faster switches, smarter routers, but you know what, it's still a bloody routing table, looks exactly like the ones I was building fifteen years ago.
I'm sure there will be major shifts, but 99% of the industry is still gonna be stuck keeping Windows XP boxes going five years from now.
Re:The same article, over and over (Score:3, Interesting)
Many companies have moved from 'find long term employee with solid fundamentals' to 'find employee with exact needed skills already so we do not have to invest in them'... so many schools that in the past focused on fundamentals have shifted to more tool based training since that is what has been getting them the highest employed/graduated ratio.
I got to watch the process first hand in my engineering school, as classes I had taken on things like programming languages (learning functional vs procedural vs oop etc) were swapped out for 'learn the fundamental web languages!'
Re:One essential skill that never changes (Score:1, Interesting)
Mod parent up!
Bit pessimistic, but very true.
The key to getting a job, especially entry level, is having the confidence in your abilities to pick up the job and letting your mouth twisting of the truth during the interview.
Again for the young bucks out there:
1. An interview is not about being honest, friendly, team-player, web2.0, 10 languages, the endless corporate and HR crap, blah blah blah.
It's about:
1. Are you confident in your abilities to perform/learn this job? If No, work either on self-confidence or polish up some skills.
2. Do you fit the mold of a person they are looking for? This is where you BS, pouring honey into their ears for their own comfort as for you know you can perform this job. This is the core skill in selling yourself. The sooner you get over your moral stance on this, the better off you'll be. You are doing yourself and them a favor. Put yourself in their shoes, they are interested in finding a person to satisfy this inaccurate mold they've constructed.
As you obtain more experience in the field, you'll have to BS little less. You will also know not to go into another job you dislike if you haven't figured this out already.
Lastly, never approach any career decision with fear or avoiding of discomfort. Be blunt. You don't oil a wheel that doesn't squeak. Don't overestimate the superficial corporate care the HR team has dedicated to your growth, only you and you alone are responsible for your career.
Btw, most of the time you'll realize that it's BS on the first few weeks on the job. You'll be deserted while they slowly "set you up with stuff". Most folks don't have the big picture of what's what in an organization let alone a concrete orientation program (and I don't mean an HR orientation). Seek out the big picture, ask questions and seek knowledge from those who are good at and like explaining things. Go through documentation, API, DB schema, etc. Get the bigger picture, get business knowledge of why you do what you do and how it fits into to the revenue stream of the company. Most importantly, make sure you remember these times when newcomers come to you. Apprenticeship is primary education, academics is secondary and mostly theoretical.
Re:Most companies (Score:4, Interesting)
Often, it's a role they have someone lined up for internally, but are forced to send out to advertisement due to policy (especially the case in the public sector).
When setting up a job description, you tailor it to exactly the skillset of the person you're hiring; it'll be highly unlikely anyone else matching it would apply (or succeed even if they get to interview).
The big problem is that HR just take out this old job description and send it out again once said person moves on, ending up with a morass of unlikely skills that are hard to fit to a single person.
Re:Specialization is not the future (Score:2, Interesting)
I think schools should be teaching more usability. I wager over half of programmers go on to make something with a UI in it, and crummy UI has been a long-standing problem in our industry. (Not talking necessarily about boxed software, which generally does an ok job, but bespoke software.)
Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me (Score:1, Interesting)
For people like you, the highest ideal in life is getting paid. For better people than you, the highest ideal in life is being worth something that can't be measured in dollars. I'm sure you clawed your way up from... (C&P Ayn Rand). Meanwhile your children will spend the next few decades learning about human beings from "those who can't."
Programmer Competence Matrix (Score:2, Interesting)
Learn to speak Chinese (Score:2, Interesting)
--edfardos
Yields of what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Water pumped steroid corn that has patents on it, and is harder for animals and humans to digest? Actually causes problems in animal studies but they sort of ignore that point because they have millions to bribe with, in political circles and at the ag colleges? Those "wonder" seeds? That academic and industry developed shit that is one of the main causes of obesity and diabetes, that stuff? Plus, you can't save seeds practically or legally with their crap, meaning you are in economic thrall to some other place forever and two days, have to pay what they demand, plus use their brand chemicals to even make the seeds work, again, whatever they demand in price??
No thanks, I'll stick to my country hayseed bumpkin non academic open pollinated seeds, save the very best ones from my yield every year, then plant those the next year. Well, as much as I can, until their patented crap has spread so much you can't do that any longer.
I don't care how much you alter them, you aren't developing *exact* good seeds for extreme specialized and local cases, the individual farm. I know my weather is different from just ten miles north of here. You have academic developed seeds to deal with that? I'll answer that, no, you don't.
If you want to do some actual research and learn something, go look how much franken academic/corporate whored off seeds have destroyed all the wonderful little specialized corn crops in Mexico, replacing nutritious corn with generic puffed water "almost could be called food" corn, and is causing economic chaos and a drop in the health of the people there because of it.
Just because you get more bushels an acre doesn't mean it is better quality, more nutritious, or even economically advantageous. It's economically advantageous to the seed and chemical companies and the asshole loan shark banks and wall street speculators and hustlers, that's it. You wind up *needing* more bushels an acre just to break even with increased costs of production.
The "green revolution" was due to cheap oil and cheap natgas and cheap phosphates and cheap weed and bug killers (especially when they didn't give a crap about long term environmental effects from those), none of which is true any more.
I farm and garden, and you can "plant" your monsanto and similar franken seeds where the sun won't shine on them.
Now, I think your point has some merit, some but not entirely, because your analogy didn't work based on real life stuff once you see through the PR propaganda that the corporate/ag-ademic heads push out. Ya, they can do it, but is it really a good deal? Just because you *can* do something like that, make cross species franken seeds, isn't the only reason that you should.
I also think you'll find the bulk of the youngerish pro farmers today have at least some college/university education and are usually *better* at general tech than most specialized IT people or pure career academics. Because they have to use such a variety of modern tech to make a living, they get more flexible at problem solving, because real life always has unexpected problems, wildcards.
There's a case to be made for single specialization, and just that, and obviously we need *some* people to do that, the very small in numbers extreme far out deep thinkers who can't tie their shoelaces or anything else much, but there's a better case to be made for higher level generalized knowledge in the "practical" world where stuff gets done. You won't get that in academia very much, it takes out in the "field" work to do that, the ag field or the shop or the data center or the factory floor or the design office, etc. Because that's where the wildcards show up that have to be dealt with *today*, thee is no luxury of another year or ten research, it has to be fixed *now*.
And that's what the article is about, in general terms, if you over specialize in just one thing, you can get shafted fast when reality changes, whereas if you do a high level gener