In the IT industry, rapid technological shifts and changing business requirements have made reshaping career paths a matter of survival.
Remember the CD-ROM?
Rob Terry remembers. For several years in the mid-1990s, he helped develop interactive discs for several companies, including InfoWorld’s sister publication, PC World. Terry’s job was to make an electronic version of the magazine related to the new technology everyone was talking about at the time: the Internet.
The CD-ROM didn’t last long.
“Some people claim that the cd-rom is the magic drive that promises to solve all our storage problems,” he said. At the time, making expensive glass masterplates was a kind of magic. To make the Internet/hybrid disc, we had to manually mark all the hyperlinks in Word and then send the document to a company in Seattle that then analyzed the document for display in the browser.”
Then the Internet took off as a preferred publishing medium, and interactive CDS instantly turned into shiny plastic coasters. So Terry moved from electronic publishing to e-commerce and then to bioinformatics, designing user interfaces for numerous clients. Now he’s the cTO and founder of Smart Catch, a company that helps commercial fisheries intelligently manage the fish that end up in their trawl nets.
The IT industry has seen many such waves in which the “next big thing” has proved to be less important and shorter-lived than first thought, thanks to rapid technological change. Back then, the Internet was a game-changing technology. Today, automation, artificial intelligence, and XX as a service are causing some jobs to disappear and others to be reinvented.
Here’s a look at the tech jobs that will someday be obsolete, even some of the hottest jobs right now, like developer and data scientist, and how you can avoid going down that dead end.
Outdated language
In the past, knowing a technical expertise almost guaranteed a job. Now, that often means being forced into early retirement.
David Cox, CEO and co-founder of LiquidVPN, an anonymous virtual private network (VPN) service, says: “When I first started in IT, I worked mostly on Windows servers. Most Windows administrators lost their jobs when Azure rose and Linux took the lead. Many of my old colleagues have had to retrain, learn Linux, or go into something else entirely.”
James Stanger, senior director of product development at CompTIA, an IT trade association, notes in particular that the more closely a job is tied to a programming language, operating system or product, the more likely IT is to end up obsolete.
“The IT jobs I see under threat are repetitive, focused only on one type of operating system or vendor system,” he says. Today, it’s not about a particular vendor or operating system, it’s about where that information resides and how efficient you are at storing, processing, and protecting that information. The key now is to connect multiple systems.”
Elizabeth Lions is an executive coach, author and president of Lionsology, a workplace leadership consultancy. A classic example, she says, is Cobol. With traditional mainframe systems still operating in large financial institutions, the older generation of employees with these skills can still command high salaries. But there aren’t as many opportunities as there used to be, and this group won’t stay in the workforce for long.
“Who has words like ‘computer operator’ in their title — these are the people who are in charge of mainframes or handling tape storage and will soon go out of style,” she says. Cobol programmers are the same. We still pay them well because they are hard to find, and if you need Cobol programmers, you need them. But they are becoming obsolete.”
The same is true for programmers familiar with C and C++, Lyons said.
“The whole world has moved to Java or. Net. You still find C++ programmers in financial companies because their systems are written in that language, but they are disappearing.”
Likewise, Smalltalk, Flex and Pascal were all once common languages, notes Geoffrey Bourne, chief technology officer at Ladders, a job site.
“But they quickly went from being popular language to just being used to maintain older systems,” he adds. Engineers and programmers need to constantly learn new languages, or they will find themselves in the position of maintaining systems rather than developing new products.”
Julia Silge, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, an online programmer community, says you can get a sense of the hot new languages and skills just by looking at what tech professionals are talking about on the site’s Q&A pages.
A few years ago, When she noticed That Ruby on Rails appeared more often on Q&A tabs during weekdays than on weekends, She realized that Ruby on Rails had become part of the daily routine, rather than just a language that programmers tinker with in their spare time.
She says there is a steady decline in demand for skills like PHP, WordPress and LAMP, while newer frameworks and languages like React, Angular and Scala are gaining popularity.
Bob Melk, president of the career website Dice, notes that the landscape is changing.
“Java and Python are hot right now,” he says. Five years from now, they may not be so hot. Which programming languages will take their place? Time will tell. The key is to keep track of the latest data.”
The Warden of the Walking Dead
Terence Chiu, vice president of Indeed Prime, a career website, notes that job openings for jobs related to maintaining IT infrastructure, such as network engineers or systems administrators, continue to decline as companies move to the cloud. But some administrator jobs have not disappeared entirely, but have moved from IT to other parts of the enterprise.
“Previously, candidates with sought-after technical skills and expertise were hired primarily to IT departments,” he says. Now more departments need traditional IT skills, from engineering and product management to business intelligence and even design.”
CompTIA’s Stanger notes, in particular, that many system administrators do not just stay in the server room, but are now in many marketing or sales departments, managing the customer relationship management (CRM) systems deployed by their companies. But he adds that IT administrators can still prove important if their skills are suited to an era of cloud computing, mobile and the Internet of things.
“Since everything is done through service level agreements (SLAs), the system administrator’s job is to put pressure on the cloud service provider,” he says. That means they need to be able to read through contracts, understand the impact, and translate technical language into terms business managers can understand.”
As for network administrators, melk says they need to understand cloud architecture as soon as possible if they want to remain relevant. In Dice’s 2017 survey, salaries for networking and storage specialists rose faster than those for any other IT job, but only for cloud-savvy professionals.
“Administrators who are only responsible for routers and hardware will have to change their roles from being local to being cloud-based if they want to remain relevant,” he says.
ToddLoeppke, chief CTO architect at Sungard availability services, notes that the same is true for old-fashioned database administrators.
“Database as a service minimizes the need to have database administrators in every IT department,” he said. Database administrators are still needed, but not as much as before. If I had been an Informix database administrator for the past 20 years and had no interest in learning how to keep my skills up to date, I would have had far fewer choices in the workplace.”
There are actually fewer technical jobs
Other once-hot tech jobs are declining rather than dying. Roles that were once professional have become part of the skill set, largely because more advanced tools have simplified and automated these roles.
At one time, webmaster, search engine optimisation specialist and social media strategist were three different jobs in a company’s IT department, says Mr Stanger. They are now part of the daily duties of marketing professionals.
Now there is a similar shift in data analytics. Big data is getting smaller every day.
“Two or three years ago, everywhere you went, you heard about ‘big data,'” said John Reed, a senior executive director at Robert HalfTechnology. We don’t actually hear that term anymore. Big data is data these days. “Many companies have identified strategies and deployed technology and dashboards, and they don’t need to hire armies of big data engineers.”
While data is more important than ever, the tools for understanding and processing it are improving more rapidly.
“Most mathematicians today, like myself, have PHDS,” says Stack Overflow’s Sierg. In five to 10 years, many of the people doing what I do now will have bachelor’s degrees and more specialized training.”
Jim Isaak is past president of IEEE Computer Society and has worked for DEC, IBM and Intel in a career spanning more than 30 years. Database specialists can also broaden their career paths by becoming data analysts, he argues.
“But in every industry there is a window of opportunity,” he notes. Data analytics is booming and may be in its heyday. 10 years from now, I’m sure data analytics skills will be important, but you may not work for the same company or have the same title.”
Hot today, out tomorrow
Right now, the hottest jobs will belong to developers, whether they’re front-end, back-end, mobile or full-stack, according to Indeed Prime’s Chiu.
But thanks to improvements in artificial intelligence, that could change relatively quickly, cautioned PK Agarwal, the regional dean at Northeastern University’s Silicon Valley campus. The school offers certificate and degree programs in business, management and technology for busy professionals.
“If I were to make a prediction, I don’t think the world would need as many programmers after 2020,” Agarwal notes. Ninety percent of the programming is translating some business specification into computer logic. This is actually a piece that machine learning and low-end AI can handle.”
Another hot job that could cool down is Internet of Things engineer, Isaac added. Today, technicians who know how to write operating systems for embedded devices have great opportunities in the workplace. In a few years, when the Internet of Things market inevitably settles, they may not be so desirable.
“What happened to the PC in the 1980s will happen to the Internet of things,” he says. There were plenty of alternatives: Sinclair and TRS 80, to name a few. Within a few years there were IBM and Apple. We expect the same thing to happen with the Internet of things. “If you’re in the Internet of Things business, you need to think long term and see where the opportunities lie.”
Study or die
The surest way to avoid a dead-end career path is to embrace new technology and never stop learning, Agarwal says.
‘Can you constantly reinvent yourself? Can you adapt existing knowledge to the next generation of technology? Lifelong learning is key.”
Dice’s Melk adds that there are plenty of opportunities for tech professionals to get new training and develop skills.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a dead-end job in IT,” he says. But jobs change all the time, and that’s a real pain point for tech professionals. The skills they learned and accumulated in college may still be important, but they need to update and expand.”
The usual advice still applies: Work on your “soft” communication skills. Liaise with sales, marketing and other departments. Learn more about the organization so that when executives decide what technology to adopt, they’ll come to you first.
Stop thinking of yourself as just a Java developer, database administrator, or interface designer, Terry says.
“Even if you have a specific skill set, the tide ebbs and flows and new fads start to emerge,” Terry says. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you need to think more broadly. It’s no longer just about finding the shortest way from point A to point B.”
Technology is evolving; If you want to avoid dead ends in your career, you need to keep up with The Times.
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