Top 10 Dead (or Dying) Computer Skills

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld reporter Mary Brandel spoke with academics and head hunters to compile this list of computer skills that are dying but may not yet have taken their last gasp. The article's message: Obsolescence is a relative — not absolute — term in the world of technology. 'In the early 1990s, it was all the rage to become a Certified NetWare Engineer, especially with Novell Inc. enjoying 90% market share for PC-based servers. "It seems like it happened overnight. Everyone had Novell, and within a two-year period, they'd all switched to NT," says David Hayes, president of HireMinds LLC in Cambridge, Mass.'"

Comments

dovetail

[Anonymous Coward]

No better place to dovetail than first post.

Here's a link to the print version for those who dislike clicking 18 times to read a news piece.

And for those not wanting to feed the gossiping trolls altogether, here's the (pointless) "Top 10" list in short form.

1. Cobol
2. Nonrelational DBMS
3. Non-IP networks
4. cc:Mail
5. ColdFusion
6. C programming
7. PowerBuilder
8. Certified NetWare Engineers
9. PC network administrators
10. OS/2

You may now return to the /. index in search of better things to quibble over.

Re:Ha! C != performance

[v01d]

You sounds trollish, but I'll bite anyway.

I've coded some fairly complicated high performance multi-threaded applications in C. It's not easy, but it's not easy in C# or Java either. There have been many minor improvements to the required syntax, but that has never been the hard part of multi-threaded development. Parallelizing (sp, I know) the problem is a conceptual problem unrelated to language.

Re:I agree totally.... BUT

[Alioth]

No it's not cheaper to implement for a 16 core space heater. The majority of computers sold today are not the mini tower room heater that you may have beside you, but embedded devices. ARM cores outsell x86 by a large margin. Atmel and Microchip sell billions of 8 bit devices every year. Zilog still manufactures the Z80, as well as microcontroller style Z80 chips. For every space heater PC, there are ten other devices that use a small processor (washing machines, microwaves, phones, cars, televisions etc.)

You _have_ to write efficient code for those. The laws of physics say that these small processors will *not* get substantially faster, because they need to be very low power and have very small die sizes, so you can't just throw MHz and extra transistors at them to compensate for software bloat. Anybody working with embedded computers still has to write efficient code, and get as close to the metal as they can. This means assembly language or C.

The cost of developer time in an embedded device that will ship millions of units is trivial compared to having to use a more powerful microcontroller to compensate for bloated code. In the PC world, of course, the opposite holds true - since the software developer is only shipping a software device, they can just rely on the customer to buy beefier hardware at no cost to the software developer. Embedded developers cannot push the cost of bloat onto their customers without losing out to their competitors.