Slashdot Mirror
Your Tech Skills Have a Two Year Half-Life
itwbennett writes "Eric Bloom, an IT leadership coach and former CIO, has answered that eternal question 'does working on old software hurt your professional marketability' with a somewhat surprising 'no.' But, Bloom adds, 'a techie's skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life. That is to say, that the exact set of skills you have today will only be half as marketable two years from now.'"
.Net is not a programming language. Two of the most popular languages used with .Net are C# and VB.Net. C# is new with .Net and is still around. VB.Net is an evolution of Visual Basic, which has existed prior to Windows 3.0. (I don't know exactly how old it is, but VB 1.0 was in text mode, and created apps for the then-current version of Windows.)
I had once felt that way too, but there's a distinct difference: doctors need only keep up with advancements in medicine or new discoveries about extant biological systems: the human body itself, however, doesn't really change (not over a few millenia, anyhow). It's a relatively stationary target.
Software, OTOH, frequently changes drastically and constantly; it's engineered by man, and can be radically altered in any number of ways on whim, forcing a reinventing of the wheel sometimes even; a moving, morphing target, much of it probably driven as much as by planned obsolescence and profit as it is utter necessity. (Does Word really need to keep "evolving" to do what it does?) Sometimes I really wanna say "screw all this" and go start a goat farm.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.