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.'"

Comments

Depends...

[Oswald McWeany]

Depends really on how specific your skills are.

Knowing, for example Java or .NET programming languages won't decline in value that fast. Perhaps specialising in certain specific products will- and certainly the development environment will.

On a non-programming side- knowing the basics of computer hardware doesn't decline in value that fast. Perhaps specialising in certain models does.

Re:Depends...

[jd]

I'd be wary about that "old knowledge". It may prove useful. There's LOTS of legacy software out there. I stay familiar with Fortran because it's still bloody good for numeric computations and it's uneconomic to translate old Fortran codes, which means I'm going to encounter it. I spent time learning about Intels iWARP chip (brilliant design, naff implementation) and Content Addressable Memory because these are ideas that have appeared multiple times and will therefore appear again. Understanding the principles now saves me time and effort for when they become important later on.

That's not to say I stay from the bleeding edge. I try to split my time 50:50 between the past that I may well encounter in the future (a trait that secured me my current job) and the future that I will certainly encounter in the future (a trait that secured me my jobs at NASA and Lightfleet). Both will come up, that is inevitable, but it's not possible to know in advance which one will come up first or in what way.

Generalizing is best done by making the fewest assumptions about the past, present and future that you can that will leave you enough time to learn the skills well.*

*This is important. 100 half-baked skills are of equal value to 100 highly-tuned future-only skills that turned out to be a dead-end. None whatsoever. Mastering a smaller set of transferable skills, legacy skills and future skills, thus being totally generalized, is the obvious ideal.

Consider the source - no wonder it's garbage!

[tomhudson]

an IT leadership coach

.... riiiiight. In other words, a buzzwad!

Even COBOL refuses to die. C, C++ and it's variants are still everywhere (Objective C for Apple's iPhone App Store) decades later. Java has outlasted the fads of Ruby and Rails. HTML has been around ... well ... since the Internet. Javascript continues to be the #1 web scripting language.

So no, your skills don't have a half-life of "X" number of years.

Re:What about languages?

[ThorGod]

Suppose I know some amount (X) of C now (Just out of college)
  Will that be less valuable after having 2 years experience in the field?

No, it wont. He's talking about *certain* IT skills. I'm going to go out on a limb and bet he's referring to the kind of tools you learn in a simple ITT-Tech type certification program.

Technic / marketing

[Cigaes]

"a techie's skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life"

Well, a marketie's skill set from a technical perspective has a zero year half-life.

Huh ?

[unity100]

im earning my living from php/mysql/html/css for the last 6 years. and im earning even more today. and having to turn down potential new clients.

Re:What about languages?

[SteveFoerster]

One simple way to avoid that type of shit from entering the workplace, refuse to hire anyone that has a technical certificate of any kind along with those with a degree from the diploma mills such as ITT Tech and Conservative err Community Colleges. Community Colleges are a fancy way of saying trade school. Employers should only hire the truly educated and those are only from the major Universities.

I work in higher education, and not for a for-profit or a community college. Your belief that graduates from "the major Universities" are somehow better than those from other institutions, especially for something like application development, is hilarious to me.

Being able to think makes you valuable.

[eriks]

As a programmer, I can say that programming itself, that is, *how* to write code, in terms of methodology -- is a skill that will never leave you once you have acquired it (so long as you keep using it).

Almost any programmer worth their salt can learn a new language in a few weeks, if not days. Granted it may take more time to develop understanding of any idioms or warts the language may have, but you can learn that stuff on the fly, unless you're writing HA/mission critical code, in which case, there'd better be a review process, and it's reasonable to expect that someone on the team will be an expert in the technology being used.

So I'd say unless you've given up programming entirely and have moved on to a different career, your skills are still valuable, and will stay reasonably "fresh" even if you're writing code in a 30-year-old language (as the article says), as long as you actually think while you write code, and aren't just a copy/paste/munge wizard, not that there's anything wrong with that, for certain kinds of things.

This of course doesn't even consider the (imho) much more valuable part of being a software developer: being able to converse with non-technical people, in whatever human language you use, and then translate that into some sort of actionable programming work. That's often more than half the battle. Then of course there is testing, testing and testing.

The article isn't completely wrong, but (like much of the "IT industry") I think it missed the point of what skills are actually important to doing software development. Knowing how to use a specific bit of kit is pretty far down on the list, I think, for any reasonably competent programmer/technologist.

I treat anything with the word "marketability" in it with suspicion.