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IT Careers in 2010 - Learn a business
feminazi writes "Business knowledge and domain specific skills are becoming more important to IT workers, according to Computerworld's special report on IT careers in 2010. The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may not have deep-seated technical skills at all. Traci A. Logan, vice president of information technology and vice provost for academic affairs at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. says, 'That [business skill set] is going to be more important than the straight technical skills they know, because you're going to see a closer marriage between the business and IT.'"
That's always been the case. Business skills, especially salesmanship is what's most important.
This has always been true. This is why you can't just replace coders. Even though there's lots of coders out there, having someone who understands your business on a higher level will help you create a much better product. You can't just high someone who's been doing financial software for 10 years to go write a game. Maybe it would be nice if companies started realizing this, and didn't just bring in contractors to do everything, who have no idea about the business, or the business's real needs.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Who will be solving the technical problems?
Look at the job boards. Employers are looking for the right mixture of product specialized knowledge. Usually that want a combination of about six different products, and it's different for every position: one may want cisco, solaris, citrix, windows, oracle, veritas. The next may want: windows, redhat, ms-sql server, perl, php, html, css. And so on.
I always get the idea that the "authorities" who right these articles don't have a clue about the real world.
You mean that business will stop treating IT
like janitorial staff? Start acting on the ideas
that IT brings to the table?
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Sorry, but I bingo'd before page 3 and had to stop reading.
Bottom line is diversify your portfolio of skills. Pick one or more of the math, engineering, financial, public speaking, etc. skills and you will have a better chance in the future.
This runs completely counter to the outsourcing and cost focus of todays businesses. Indeed even people hired "permanantly" are usually seen as expendable at the end of major projects. These are the ones with the most domain knowledge. Business types tend to be "visionaries" and whip crackers. Rarely do the excel at requirements or planning. I have worked for major corporations since 1990 and I see the gulf between management and software professionals growing widerthan ever with the increasing sophistication of tools and the increasing complexity of projects. Engineering culture has all but disappeared.
an ill wind that blows no good
The flip side of contractors not knowing anything about a business is companies with internal software developers who don't know how to develop. I've been on both sides of the fence, and there's no simple answer to the issue of corporate software development. I can tell you that I've worked in some places where the existing software was put together so poorly that it was little more than a deck of cards waiting to fall. "But it addresses the business needs!" is a valid point, to be sure, but when small enhancement requests which should take a day start taking >1 week solely because the original software was put together so poorly, you've got bigger problems than whether someone understands the unique business needs or not. The first core business need is that the software needs to be available and known to be functioning properly - you need to have confidence in it. Without skilled developers with a track record of proven success, that trust is harder to come by.
The best middle ground is to have hybrid people - people who have thought and can think from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. When contractors are brought in, if there's no one who can explain the business requirements at *any* level (and I've been in some places like that over the years), it's not the outside contractor's fault.
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Can't get the idea of Roy Scheider using an Apple //GS (the true technology of the future!) out of my head, along with the damn spinning sand-covered pacman spaceship. Arthur C. Clarke surely would have been rolling in his grave over THAT movie if the damn old coot had died long ago like the other scifi grand masters.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Geez - these IT career planning stories are getting tiresome.
You want to make money? Quit beating around the bush and
just go to law school!
... where all the actual work is done by immigrants or off-shored because no one local knows how to do it anymore.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Sure, what's "most important" is being able to sell. Particularly when the corporate network was just cracked and you have to explain to the CEO why all the clients have been looking at "j00 b33n pwN3d" on your website all morning.
Technical skills? Not so important.
That's "sarcasm" for those of you unable to see it.
Being a good salesman can get you in the door and on the project. But nothing will help if you don't have the tech skills to deliver.
Particularly as more and more of the business is being put on the 'web. The best people will have the tech skills and the business knowledge and the salesmanship skills. But the tech skills are the most important.
What the hell does that mean?
I think we need to start with: "Learn how to communicate"
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Anyone who's worked with offshore resources knows this is exaclty true. A couple of years ago I was contracted at a large 401k company when they brought in massive amounts of Indian labor. They were bright, spoke English well, and did passable work...but they didn't know a thing about retirement accounts or any other American financial practices. I was far, far more valuable working with them as a business analyst then I was as a coder. Yeah, those of us Americans who are left in IT in 2010 are going to have to know the businesses very well.
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I'm hopeless and should quit IT. When I read your last sentence ...
IT is just a vehicle to delivering faster, and more effective business drivers.
I visualized IT as a minivan delivering the likes of Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Little E, etc. to their retirement assignments: Driving business executives around.
It's bedtime kiddies.
There was a time when IT was a part of R&D and it's gone. A natural cycle of every technology kicks in. During emerging stages a technology is a research. After a technology comes out of the woodwork and mass-adoption starts, a technology becomes a production.
There is no magic in computer development any more. Adoption and demand are so high, people literally code for food. Take a look at your ten year old coding his website and think how many people could do that fifteen years ago.
The fact that there are so many companies nowadays in 3rd world counties (no offence meant) who act as major players in outsourcing means we are far beyond research and development stage in IT.
We did not need business people to manage IT when it was R&D simply because any R&D requires tremendous dedication and you can't do both research and business.
A production can and has to be managed. Business skills mean more than research capabilities in production. Why approach the problem with your mind if you can approach it with your pocket book and do not pay an arm and a lag?
I'm not worried a single bit about IT researchers. They are very bright, hard working and will be able to adapt. One year in an MBA programs is all they need.
The person writing the article is clearly seeing this from a managerial point of view, and not as someone who actually understands the technical side of IT. What I read between the lines was that the expectation is that FTE's will be more business and vendor/project management oriented while the pure IT skills will be contractors or PS engagements with vendors.
As someone who's seen this first hand, I don't think the author has hit the mark at all. Instead of shifting high level responsibility on day to day IT folk, they would be better to invest in key architects and engineers who can bring all of the existing reponsibilities together. These positions require leadership and long term planning/project management. These types of folks will replace the VP of IT types that write these articles, not the specialized IT skillsets that we have today.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
...bullshit I keep hearing for over a decade now. Ths most sought after people will still be those that understand what they are doing. I am really fed up with management types tryinf to convince the world, that IT people are actually sort-of failed managers. The real reason is that the managers have an inferiority comples, since they do know that they can never, ever, under any circumstances replace an IT specialist. Too much air, greed and selfishness in their heads. On the other hand many managers are so bad at their job, that most IT people would do at least as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Bentley is a business school. This is basically them saying, "Wahhhh... we wish IT people know our line of business... wahhhhh...."
Duh, or COURSE they wish IT people knew their line of business. So why don't we start looking at the courses they'd like CS majors to NOT take in order to make time for the business courses. Databases? Obvious nope. Programming languages or operating systems? Not a great idea if you want them to pick up new platforms / languages quickly. Algorithms? Don't hire that person to a project where you need advanced warning that something won't scale well. Computer graphics? OK, maybe that one is rarely necessary, but that's just one course.
My point is whether or not the author knows it, they're asking to eat their cake and (still) have it too. They want someone to study the line of business more, but ignore the dumbing-down effect that has on their IT skills. Taken to that extreme, you may as well just offer a few extra "IT" courses within the business department, and let those people be your company's IT staff. Which in most cases is moronic for well-known reasons.
I've only worked in corporate America for 3 years now, but I see a couple trends: 1. There are 3 basic types of IT: - Production Support - the folks who run the systems from a day to day standpoint - Admins - the folks who keep the systems running on a slightly longer time frame than day to day - Developers - ie programmers who write the code to do the above two functions Prod support and admin functions can be outsourced relatively easily. Dev functions often require a good deal of business knowledge. What pisses me off are the developers who on the one hand complain about management's shortcomings, yet when backed into a corner play the whole 'well, that's not what the spec says' card. Lame if you ask me. You may be intelligent, but intelligence is rarely the limiting factor in corporate america (by, 'rarely' i mean never. if you think otherwise, typically that implies you are probably arrogant.)
Wait, so where do these IT people get all these conglamoration of skills? Seems like you can't do it without several years of working history. If anything, that tells me the industry will start to heavily focus on internal training to ensure new and old IT staff can fill this new gap.
You aren't born with business/writing/accounting know-how, nor with IT knowledge. People already spend a lifetime trying to be an expert in their respective fields. You can't be an expert in every field, especially those that require distinctly different skills.
I've never understood why business people, management, basically any non-technical position is considered the top part of the totem pole. Put 4 engineers together and they are going to make something really interesting that just may better this planet. Put 4 businessmen together and they'll probably come up with a new cover sheet for a 3 letter report.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I don't know about you, but that's a huge warning to me.
So, the "most sought-after" IT worker will be one who can
Why? Because
Translation:
2010 management will demand IT staff who can understand the business and technology sufficiently to manage the out-sourced projects.
Said out-sourced projects will be the actual writing of the software that supports the company and the end-user support of the remaining company employees who use the software that was written by other people outside the company.
Welcome to the "Titanic" business model.
I'm sure you can all imagine the fun that that will be. With the out-sourced support staff blaming the out-sourced programmers and the out-sourced programmers blaming the support staff
What else did you expect to hear out of a business school?
The IT people who are always going to be in demand are those who make sh*t work - whether those are managers pulling projects together under time/budget, or coders/networking/systems people who fix broken stuff and build the right new environments.
Yes, you'd damn well better have the needs of the business in mind in any position. But if Company A decides they're going to have manager types who don't have IT skills doing skilled IT work, they're going to find out real quick that sh*t don't work and there's no one around who can fix it.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
We want to hire one person not only to do the tech skills of four but we now want you to be our point of sale and make it all happen. We'll pay you for the talents of 1.5 employees while we keep costs down by 3.5 employees.
And that is the essence of "tech viewpoint" vs "business viewpoint".
May I dare to suggest that you develop tech skills and business skills? I am not employed in management, and don't intend to be, but understanding some of the skills/viewpoints of management allows me to:
1. Better understand the priorities of management (you know, those guys that sign the cheques?)
2. Be more skilled at promoting my ideas to management (the stuff alot of workers find really difficult, but is really valuable to the company)
3. Deal with customer issues more succesfully (for some reason our customers are more concerned with being profitable than with being assured by me that our product is within the ordered specification. This sometimes involves coming up with solutions that require some knowledge of business)
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