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Technology Sectors that are Hot or Heating Up Now?

Posted by Cliff on from the searching-for-that-next-career dept.

unemployedCoder-in-retraining asks: "As a recently "leisured" programmer, I'm very interested in trying to turn misfortune into opportunity. This means using this career discontinuity to bone up on the latest-n-greatest in the hot sectors of the industry, to offer a better chance of a finding another great job. Of course, then one asks: 'What's Hot?' The Telco/Switching sector seems to have flatlined (Nortel and Lucent as examples). Cable and DSL access device and service development seems to be struggling. Wireless 3G networks seem to be having a hard time in North America. And yet, we here that a recovery is underway and that the technology sector as a whole is picking up again. So I ask you: 'Where?' In what sectors? What are the most important new technologies to learn to enhance employability? Somewhere, somebody is hiring or will be soon. What do I and other victims of the slowdown have to know to 'get back in the saddle' in the near future?"

4 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. This one's heating up real hot... by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 4, Informative

    Bioinformatics.

    Just north of Washington DC area there are almost 200 companies that are working in the bioinformatics area s. Subject knowledge is good of course but even better is knowledge of Perl. O'Reilly even has 2 books Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics and Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills

    Then there are companies that are doing lots of work regarding facial recognition.

    Hope this helps.

  2. Re:Bio-informatics by Paul+Johnson · · Score: 5, Informative
    Biotech is increasingly an IT-intensive industry. Some of the biggest iron in the world exists to crunch biotech problems, mostly related to protein folding and drug interactions. They also generate huge amounts of experimental data that has to be managed and mined. Finally there is a lot of automated lab equipment for parallelising those bits of it that still involve real chemicals and real biology.

    The field here is wide open. Lots of university biology departments are spinning off companies to make innovative new sensors, so you can get involved there. Or you can go and manage a Beowulf cluster for a big drug firm. Or anything in between.

    Paul.

    --
    You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
  3. Re:pornography by Tranvisor · · Score: 4, Informative

    Come on, give credit where credit's due.

    The Step 1,2,3 joke is from a Southpark episode. Specifically, "The Underpants Gnomes".

    The original joke was that the gnnomes buisness method was:

    Step 1: Steal Underpants
    Step 2: ??? (None of the gnomes could remember)
    Step 3: Profit!!

  4. Re:web services by tzanger · · Score: 4, Informative

    i know it sounds like a trendy buzz-word but i think it's here to stay and some seriously cool stuff will start to happen soon (look at Google).

    The web is dead.

    I didn't create this tech but I am using it to replace shitty HTML+Jscript+prayers+sacrifices web-based interfaces. There are some other guys like XWT too but XWT is simple, straightfoward and fast. It essentially projects UIs -- do you forms locally (on the client machines) but all your business logic sits on a server where it belongs. Talkes XML-RPC and SOAP. Very cool. Way way way better than what I would call traditional "web services."