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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.'"
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
As a general rule I don't even list things on my CV (resume) that I have less than two years experience in, these days...
I'm willing to accept this is the case for startups wanting the latest buzzword filled technology, but a LOT of places are happy at a much slower pace.
I don't think the theory applies universally to all tech skills. C has endured well over the years. So has SQL. Other languages, not so much. I don't see many ads for Ada or Lisp these days. Your actual mileage may vary.
.. an IT leadership coach ... uh-huh. Veiled message is "take my course, buy my book". I'm still employed using skills I learnt in 1980. Eric Bloom can get the hell off my lawn.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
I still program in Java which I've been doing since 1998. I also sometimes program in Python which I've been doing since 1997. Obviously some things about those languages have changed, but many things haven't.
OO languages are fairly similar to what they were 10 years ago. As is OO design, etc. There have been large changes to frameworks etc, but there is a significant "core skill set" which transfers over.
In my case, my skills have not become become less marketable at all over the last two years. Recently I spent two years out of work (voluntarily), and when I returned to the job market I had no problem whatsoever finding a job.
I think the half-life of skills is more like 15 years.
That said, I've been coding QA software in some VB-Form language since 1994. My pay during that time has only increased. This is the first year that I've had to do anything in a C-form language.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that a lot of new technologies are horse puckey. C++ was an actual improvement over C. The .net platform, for all its many faults, has actually increased my productivity, but much of the rest, Windows Presentation Foundation, Python, Ocaml, Ruby, Silverlight, et. al are nifty, but nobody *needs* them. Frankly, if the world standardized on Java tomorrow, and we just used extensions thereof for different platforms and purposes, we could all concentrate on getting useful work done and quit dicking around with learning the latest obscure and allegedly more elegant syntax. The best language and syntax isn't the most logically consistent one, it's the one you know. In productivity terms, human factors trump formal systems elegance every time.
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This certainly fits my experience. I'm "over 39" and have specific tech skills that date back to the early 80s. Those are worthless. I continued doing highly technical work and staying current into the late 90s, when I went back to school to build up some of my non-technical skills. Not such a good idea as it sounded. I emerged from school several years later with just enough still-marketable skills to land a tech job that offered little opportunity to further advance my skills, then got laid off from that, took a retail job as a life raft.... and now my "freshest" marketable tech skills are a dozen years old, and close to worthless. I guess it's time to get out the paintbrushes and see if I can swing a new career as an artist; at least the half-life on those skills isn't as short.
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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.
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.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
"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.
I do not know why this is in the front page, and I do not know why the educated crowd of Slashdot listens to BS from the CIO/CEO/CXO of the day and his new genius theory to quantify things he should not, mainly because he does not understand what technology is about. These guys should be in marketing. There are new technologies and old technologies, and jobs for all of them if you are good and know the right people. If you are very good at Fortran or Cobol you can get a job. If you excel at Java or C you can get a job. None of these are new technologies by far, and the skills are highly portable from one to the other. The basic knowledge you need is always sort of the same, a mix or common sense, knowledge of the basics (algorithms, data structures, and a brief background on the problem domain you are working on), and some minimum social skills.
Depends who interviews you really. If you're interviewed by someone who was a developer once- sure.
However, it's just as common to have someone with a non-programming background being the person involved in running IT departments. (especially in manufacturing- if you're working at a mid-sized company in manufacturing- almost all the IT managers came from sales or accounting and know very little about computers).
Quite frankly- IT is not a career to take if you ever want a promotion. Sure, it can happen- but you'll lose out to other departments time and time again.
There are too few IT managers that know IT.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you are trying to market yourself with buzzword technologies and languages, then yes, your marketability decreases over time. On the other hand, if you are marketing yourself for less trendy technical work, maybe not. There are still a lot of COBOL and FORTRAN programmers out there, and they command some pretty competitive salaries. There are a lot of systems that were installed over decade ago that work just fine and just need people to support and maintain them, along with occasionally adding an interface for some newer system.
Palm trees and 8
This is a reflection of a serious problem in the area of hiring decent techie folks. There's a difference between a "marketable" skill and a "useable" skill. A marketable skill gets you hired by people who are clueless about what makes a good techie (hardware or software) and only know buzzwords, whereas a useable skill is what the people who you're going to work with and for HOPE you have. Sometimes skills overlap between marketable and useable, but my own observation is the larger the company doing the hiring the less overlap there is.
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.
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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.
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I suspect that the Bloom is referring 'tech' skills in a general sense. Most IT people are not programmers, and thus consume rather than create software products. If you have 'skills' using Office version X, it will probably not be as valuable in two years when a new and improved product, Office X+1 comes out.
.Net have been around awhile and are not going to go away.
Obviously, if you think of IT as just programers, what he is saying makes no reals sense, since staples like C, Java, and
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
"Employers should only hire the truly educated and those are only from the major Universities"
What a pompous ass thing to say. If/when you get out of mom's basement and into the real world, you may see that many jobs/careers are perfectly suited for trade school graduates. Like maybe, umm, trades? Technicians? It doesn't take a rocket scientist .. etc.
It jobs need apprenticeships not 4-5 years in a class room. IT is a trade and CS is the high level stuff.
How marketable is SQL? There are two ways to look at it. Will SQL help you distinguish yourself from others and leave them in the dust? No. But just try to get hired without it.
There are lots of legacy databases out there, and you won't be talking to them without a fair understanding of SQL. Even the niftiest of whiz-bang query tools will generate flawed SQL every so often, leaving you on your own to figure it out.
You can make a name for yourself outside of school in place of that set of credentials. You provide measurable experience and anyone worth interviewing with will not overlook that...
Brian Fundakowski Feldman