Skills Needed For a Future In IT

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.'"

Comments

Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[hessian]

'They're about five years behind where they need to be.'

These days, anyone that industry likes is an "expert."

College works best when it functions as (a) a qualification program and (b) a general, background, theoretical and broad study of the subject matter.

Qualification in this case means that you go to college to endure an extended test that ultimately shows how dedicated and intelligent you were. Made it through four years of Harvard? You're pretty good, usually.

A general background means that you study the theory and a broad survey of the topic, so that you understand the underlying issues and the basic methods of addressing them.

I don't think it makes sense to teach specifics in college, except vocational colleges like community colleges. That's the kind of stuff you learn on your first few jobs anyway, and it's so rapidly changing that trying to get college to teach it is a moving target no one will hit.

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[Peach Rings]

Not to mention that the amount of arrogance in calling academia some kind of industry training ground is ludicrous. Who is he to tell the universities where they "need to be?"

If you ask me, it's academia that is important and significant, and industry is just something you have to do for food.

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[bsDaemon]

Quit thinking like an academic and start thinking like a business... "on-the-job training" is a cost sink hole, because they don't want to pay enough or provide good enough benefits to keep people around long enough to make any investment in training worth it. So they want schools to do it, but the schools have this funny notion about how they're supposed to teach people who to learn and think, not how to work with technology X, because they know technology X is going to be obsolete in a few years anyway.

The HR people who don't know what they're talking about, look at a check list and can't think about how a skill in one thing might translate (odd, because they're philosophy degrees prepared them to ask big, important questions right out of school... like "do you want fries with that?" before they "translated" their skill set in to HR... hrm...). Case in point, this hosting company I used to work at got real corporate about the time I left, and actually got some HR people and whatnot. A friend of mine applied there, got an interview, and then was told no because he didn't know PHP, despite having a few years of Perl. Cause, you know, the sheet said PHP, and programming can't possibly just be programming, right?

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[roman_mir]

Academia vs Business, it's all explained here.

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[Mongoose Disciple]

A friend of mine applied there, got an interview, and then was told no because he didn't know PHP, despite having a few years of Perl. Cause, you know, the sheet said PHP, and programming can't possibly just be programming, right?

That's not completely invalid, unless your friend was the only candidate.

Learning a new programming language is usually trivial. Learning all of the libraries, design ideas, best practices, hidden pitfalls, etc. around that language usually isn't. Hell, at an enterprise level I'm not an especially qualified Java developer today despite having a good 8 or so years of professional Java dev on my resume because so much of the constructs and practices around the language are constantly changing and I haven't done enough of it lately.

Sometimes someone who has the background to eventually learn how to do a job well is good enough -- but if you're competing with people who are ready to do it on day one because they do have the specific experience, don't be surprised if you don't get the offer.

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[malkavian]

Actually, Philosophy wouldn't be bad, as you could appeal to their logic. Philosophers are usually pretty decent at that.
The problem is that HR is frequently filled with arts, media and 'communication studies' graduates who fervently believe that as long as they keep talking and passing paper around, it'll all be alright.
They rarely have any idea of what the jobs they're advertising for are actually about, but hey, put a tick in the box, and what could possibly go wrong!

The biggest problem with HR is lots of power (they create the policies by which hirings and firings can be made), with very little accountability.

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[Rich0]

With enough time, it will undoubtedly become a pseudo religion of it's own.... as demonstrated by it's dedicated clerics such as yourself.

The irony is that the back when universities were created (in Western culture at least), the students were actually considered clerics. They were run by monks, and used to train the children of nobility. The church was actually a bit of a vocational education system as well, as almost all the serious "educated" work of the day was actually performed by clergy. The guy figuring out tax rates was probably a bishop, fully employed by the local lord. That is why kings exercised the right to approve the appointment of bishops at the time - the bishops performed many administrative functions. No wonder, since the clergy were about the only ones who could read at the time...

Re:Mis-use of college, if you ask me

[Peach Rings]

When a person can spend four to six years in an educational system and not learn any applicable skill to be used in the real world, the education system has failed.

Yes of course the IT industry needs an army of relatively mindless workers who can configure network switches or whatever skill you consider useful. You can earn a good living doing it and there's not really any reason to go to college for it. But the real work that matters (where they can't just drop another IT guy in the slot if you die) has been done by people who actually developed the theory behind the technology.

There's a lot of vitriol in your comment directed at academia, and I could open the fire hose back at you but I won't. Just know that engineer types like you are something of a joke in math/CS circles. Like a dusty farmer in overalls driving his tractor around feeling proud that he's doing something productive for society and disdaining the far-off castle-tower academics who just drain resources, while unknown to him the genetically modified seeds he's planting are increasing yields more than even inhuman hard work ever could. It's really a ridiculous image.

So keep plugging your network cables or whatever you do from your 40th percentile income bracket, and leave the thinking to people who went to college.

Five years behind?

[Manip]

They've been calling colleges out for being "five years behind" since the first Computer Science programs started. But truthfully they are always at least five years behind, but while true the skills most teach are already "soft" enough to transfer into the latest and greatest toys. Java? Now you can write PHP, or C#. C? Now you can write Object C, D, and C++.

There is always this interesting push between what I like to term the Computer Science Vs. Software Engineering people, in which the former always wants to play with new interesting toys, write code, and generally act like an impulsive teenager, while the latter wants to be an old man, being safe, writing plans, timetables, and those middle management bits that drive CS people up the wall.

I think when we're young (mentally) we're CS, and as we age we gradually turn into Software Engineers.

Re:Five years behind?

[vux984]

There is always this interesting push between what I like to term the Computer Science Vs. Software Engineering people, in which the former always wants to play with new interesting toys, write code, and generally act like an impulsive teenager, while the latter wants to be an old man, being safe, writing plans, timetables, and those middle management bits that drive CS people up the wall.

I think when we're young (mentally) we're CS, and as we age we gradually turn into Software Engineers.

Agreed - except for the terminology. The group you call CS are just 'software hackers' (in the good sense of the word).

CS is a completely separate item...its actual computer science (algorithms, complexity theory, logic, network topology, relational calculus, etc...).

Hackers and engineers both benefit from CS... but it really has no bearing on whether you hack a ruby on rails (lanuage selected as place holder for 'trendy new language you also learned while doing the project') project together in an afternoon based on the 'specs in your head' or take a month to architect it in java (language selected as place holder for older language developer has lots of experience with) with defined project milestones, spec's documentation, interface documentation, etc.

CS is orthoganal to project management.

Specialization is not the future

[bjackson1]

I've been working in IT for some time now, and I think that that any specialized hard-skils are pointless. Most of my success has been able to adapt to new technologies, languages, ideas, etc. IT is constantly changing (which is what attracted me to it). What you need is a solid background in IT concepts (how to program in A language, how to understand the TCP/IP stack, what a protocol is, etc), a solid understanding of interpersonal communication, and a willingness to change and adapt.

Re:Specialization is not the future

[mlts]

Being in IT, there are some concepts that just stand the test of time, regardless if it was the 90s and working with IRIX or today where one is using Nexus switches as SAN heads:

1: The concept of production equipment. This is a fact that a lot of people don't understand. Production machines don't get packages du jour installed on them. Any changes are well documented both to help other co-workers as well as for CYA reasons. This is a concept that a lot of people don't get until well-bloodied in the IT arenas. There is a reason why xroach and xbaby are likely not present on the production SAP cluster, and it is a good one.

2: The concept of the fact that sometimes a commercial product has a price tag, but it will more than pay for itself with time and effort saved. For example, I can cobble a backup solution together with rsync that all the machines on a network can dump to a device. Or I can use a chargeable backup product like Networker, NetBackup, TSM, or another utility that can do D2D2T, keep track of what media is where, generate recovery plans, ensure media is encrypted, and keep track of the rotation of media coming and going from Iron Maiden's offsite facility. For production critical stuff, the commercial program may cost a lot, but if deployed correctly, will be worth the price tag.

3: The concept of OS agnosticism. Yes, a person may like a certain platform, but in IT, various operating systems are best for different tasks.

4: Basic data center stuff. Don't store your beer in the CRAC ducts. Don't lift up the molly guard on the EPO switch as a joke because there is a chance of getting bumped and falling into it. Put the raised floor tiles back so the other people don't fall down. Don't use your tongue on the Ethernet cables to check for carrier because it corrodes contacts. Don't bring the 44 ounce Big Guzzles with lids that are not firmly in place. Same with uncovered coffee mugs. Don't stand on the racks to try to get something at the ceiling. Don't haul a 400 pound rack of Sun equipment with multiple disk arrays up the stairs because the elevator is slow. This is common sense stuff, but there are people who don't get this, and there is nothing worse than sitting in a server room as the room goes absolutely silent, since someone mashed the EPO button on a dare.

5: Common courtesy. Yes, someone may have root/Admin access, but if they are on systems they don't own trying to fix stuff, it causes big problems due to communication. If someone is on a system that isn't "theirs" and spots an issue, try communicating first.

6: Stuff changes. The days of remembering how easy and BSD-like SunOS 4.1.4 are long since past. Same with the days of SONET, dual-ring FDDI, ATM rings, and 4/16 mbps token ring networks. One has to adapt, remember the old stuff fondly, and realize that those technologies are history, replaced by Solaris, switched core/edge fabric, and cat 6a drops.

7: The ability to spend time wisely. There may be some issue that comes up that may take a lot of time to solve. However, it might be that that has to be handed over to someone else, or *GASP* company tech support must be called. Time for an IT person is precious, so tinkering with a problem may be fun, but it may land one into hot water as other things are left unfinished.

None of this stuff is taught in a classroom.

One essential skill that never changes

[Locke2005]

The ability to bullshit people into thinking that you know what you are doing despite the fact that half your job consists of trial-and-error attempts to work around the constraints imposed by other people that managed to bullshit people into thinking they knew what they were doing.

Tomorrow will be like yesterday

[ChefInnocent]

10 years ago when I was in college, I asked what the future of computing was going to be like. I was told that linear algebra would probably become much more important because quantum computing was on the horizon. Quantum computing still hasn't materialized, but linear algebra is looking to be more important anyway. The cool bit about linear algebra: it's always been useful. 10 years ago, we were talking about resource problems. Today those problems still exist. A good algorithm is just as important, and understanding the computability of a problem. 10 years ago, we were talking about the importance of having a deep understanding of the languages, not just knowing "C, C++, or Java". Today, a deep understanding will still help, and knowing only the fad-language-of-the-day will still get you in trouble. 10 years ago we talked about multi-processor programming. Today we talk about mutli-core programming. Multi-threaded applications have been around for a long time. Other issues: security, project management, and software lifecycle. I've yet to see a new issue, just an old one in a different way.

6 years ago, I wrote a software requirement spec, and software design spec. In it I said the web application had to be able to run efficiently on a 300MHz processor over a 56K modem. I didn't realize that in 6 years, smart phones were going to be so predominant that people would still be using 300MHz processors over 56K connections.

Today, tomorrow, yesterday; it's all about understanding the fundamentals. The details may change, but the foundation is the same.

Tell that to HR and hiring managers...

[Richard Steiner]

Until then, it's the hard skills that most companies use as the prime determinate for whether or not a given application gets a first-level interview.

IT is one of the absolutely worst industries for pigeonholing, and your last job is the one that gets tattooed on your forehead, not the stuff you know (or think you know) the best.

Welcome to reality ... for the past 20+ years, sadly. I don't see it changing soon, as that requires an actual level of understanding on the part of those that be hiring.