21–30 of 48 posts
Given the amount of maintenance needed for all the polyglot legacy code bases, I would imagine that there will be plenty of work for people as they move through their own career cycle.
OP Links to a Ray Kurzweil article at end of his piece that could be useful!
80 - everybody does fortran (57) - play around with pascal (70), basic (64) - evaluates Unix and C (73) - play around with small-talk (80), learn OO
I seems, like the pattern is, to figure out what language/paradigm, that was invented 10 years ago, and just seems to have matured enough, that everybody will be trying to use it/imitate it 10 years down the line :-)
Actually, if the OP's way to stay ahead of it is to learn an emerging technology every 7 years or so, it seems the steam-roller is moving quite slowly. 80 - everybody does fortran (57) - play around with pascal (70), basic (64) - evaluates Unix and C (73) - play around with small-talk (80), learn OO I seems, like the pattern is, to figure out what language/paradigm, that was invented 10 years ago, and just seems to h…
I.e Ajax, invented ~2000, production use by google ~2005, everybody's grandmother uses it ~2010.
Actually, if the OP's way to stay ahead of it is to learn an emerging technology every 7 years or so, it seems the steam-roller is moving quite slowly. 80 - everybody does fortran (57) - play around with pascal (70), basic (64) - evaluates Unix and C (73) - play around with small-talk (80), learn OO I seems, like the pattern is, to figure out what language/paradigm, that was invented 10 years ago, and just seems to h…
Ok, maybe the window is getting shorter... I.e Ajax, invented ~2000, production use by google ~2005, everybody's grandmother uses it ~2010.
It's the kind of thing that even a moderately experienced programmer can understand within 10 minutes, and then have used it successfully another 10 minutes after that.
Asynchronous HTTP requests weren't a new idea in the early 2000s, by any means. I'd used C and Perl libraries that allowed for just that back in the 1990s. The only thing novel about it is that it could be done from the browser, using JavaScript. Really, AJAX is more a testament to how limited the browser and JavaScript are, rather than some great new technology.
There is no steamroller. I know many programmers feel this way, but in my humble opinion it is a fallacy, and not a very healthy one. No-one can deny that our industry is evolving at breakneck speed, and it is an exhilarating place to be. But just because there's a new technology every week on HN doesn't mean that we are losing old ones at a similar rate. It is perfectly possible to have done nothing but C or Java fo…
"It is perfectly possible to have done nothing but C or Java for your entire career and yet remain extremely employable." I am Java programmer and the above seems to be true. However, it does not mean that Java programmers can stop learning and code as if it would be 1995. Even if you confine yourself into Java world only, there is enough to be learned in five lifetimes. Many people here equate "learning something ne…
This is a great point. Java in 1995 and Java in 2014 are nearly different languages. If you add in common frameworks like Hibernate and Spring a programmer who hasn't learned anything new since 1995 will be just as confused as a person coming to 2014 Java from another imperative language.
There is no steamroller. I know many programmers feel this way, but in my humble opinion it is a fallacy, and not a very healthy one. No-one can deny that our industry is evolving at breakneck speed, and it is an exhilarating place to be. But just because there's a new technology every week on HN doesn't mean that we are losing old ones at a similar rate. It is perfectly possible to have done nothing but C or Java fo…
I'm in agreement here. The engineers that will lose out are the ones that think that by learning the latest and greatest frameworks and libraries, they are somehow improving in their mastery. This is, in fact, stamp collecting. Fewer and fewer engineers feel comfortable doing the basics. Implementing a raw custom data structure, writing a new parser, twiddling bits on a wire, debugging segmentation faults. The new-ag…
Actually, I wonder if the steamroller is age.
I can remember talking to a HR at a company I used to work for. I asked why they spent so much more effort on recruiting graduates and juniors than seniors.
'Seniors cost twice as much as juniors. We need them, but we only need one for every three juniors'
If that means only one in three juniors gets to be a senior, I wonder what happened to the other two. No one hires a junior with ten years experience, so I guess they don't work as programmers anymore. I hope they are project managers. Maybe that explains why project managers are always so angry.
It takes a decade to learn something inside and out, and then you can't spend all day learning which JS mvc framework has gone out of style over the weekend. If your technology lasted long enough for you to become an expert, you can probably make a living on it even if it goes out of style like COBOL. And if you are a skilled developer you have no problem applying your knowledge to a new platform/language.
Those who get steamrolled are those who work but don't develop their skils. After 10 years with COBOL you will be steamrolled unless you have actually become an expert at software development, not just an expert at your job.
The field has widened, but that just means you have to choose between being an expert and being a jack-of-all-trades. You can't be an expert at everything. It takes a decade to learn something inside and out, and then you can't spend all day learning which JS mvc framework has gone out of style over the weekend. If your technology lasted long enough for you to become an expert, you can probably make a living on it ev…
There is no steamroller. I know many programmers feel this way, but in my humble opinion it is a fallacy, and not a very healthy one. No-one can deny that our industry is evolving at breakneck speed, and it is an exhilarating place to be. But just because there's a new technology every week on HN doesn't mean that we are losing old ones at a similar rate. It is perfectly possible to have done nothing but C or Java fo…