The working dead: IT jobs bound for extinction Rapid shifts in technologies—and evolving business needs—make career reinvention a matter of survival in the IT industry
From InfoWorld
Remember CD-ROMs?Read the rest here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3196022/it-careers/the-working-dead-it-jobs-bound-for-extinction.htmlRob Terry does. For a few 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 create electronic versions of the magazine that connected with this new thing everyone was talking about called the internet.
"CD-ROMs were promised as this magical optical drive that would solve all our storage problems," he says. "Back then, authoring expensive glass masters was a mysterious black art. For web/hybrid CDs we had to tag all the hyperlinks by hand inside Word, then ship the documents off to a company in Seattle that would parse them to display inside a browser."
Then the web took off as the publishing medium of choice, instantly turning interactive discs into shiny plastic coasters. Terry moved from electronic publishing to e-commerce, then bio-informatics, designing user interfaces for a wide range of clients. Now he's CTO and founder of Smart Catch, which helps commercial fisheries intelligently manage the fish that end up in their trawl nets.
The IT industry has seen many such waves where the "next big thing" turned out to be smaller and shorter-lived than anyone expected, thanks to rapid shifts in technology. Back then, the internet was the big game changer. Today, automation, artificial intelligence, and _____ as a service are causing some jobs to disappear and others to radically change form.
Here’s a look at the kinds of tech jobs—even some of today’s hottest, like developers and data scientists—that could one day find themselves on the digital scrap heap and how you can avoid that dead end.
Dead languages
In the past, specialization in a particular tech discipline almost guaranteed employment. Now it’s a ticket to involuntary retirement.
“When I first started out in the IT industry, I did a lot of Windows server work,” says David Cox, CEO and co-founder of LiquidVPN, an anonymous virtual private network service. “The rise of Azure and the Linux takeover has put most Windows admins out of work. Many of my old colleagues have had to retrain for Linux or go into something else entirely.”
The more closely a job is tied to a specific language, operating system, or product, the more likely it is to eventually become obsolete, notes James Stanger, senior director of product development for CompTIA, an IT industry trade association.
“The IT jobs I see threatened are the repetitive ones and those that focus on only one type of OS or vendor system,” he says. “Today it’s not about the vendor or OS; it’s about where the information resides and how useful you are at storing, manipulating, and securing that information. It's all about connecting multiple systems now.”
The classic example is Cobol, says Elizabeth Lions, an executive coach, author, and president of Lionsology, a job leadership consultancy. Because legacy mainframe systems remain in operation at large financial institutions, aging boomers with these skills can still demand top dollar. But there are far fewer opportunities than before, and they won’t be around for much longer.
"Anyone with the words 'computer operator' in their job title—people who work on mainframes or deal with tape storage—is going away,” she says. “Cobol programmers are right along with them. We still pay them handsomely because they're hard to find, and when you need one, you really need one. But they're becoming obsolete."
The same holds for coders weaned on C and C++, says Lions.
“The entire world has gone to Java or .Net. You still find C++ coders in financial companies because their systems are built on that, but they're disappearing."
Likewise, Smalltalk, Flex, and Pascal were all commonly used languages at one time, notes Geoffrey Bourne, CTO of job site Ladders.
“But they quickly went from being popular to being only useful for maintaining older systems,” he adds. “Engineers and programmers need to continually learn new languages, or they’ll find themselves maintaining systems instead of creating new products.”
Julia Silge, a data scientist for online programmer community Stack Overflow, says watching what tech pros are talking about on the site’s Q&As—in particular when they’re doing it—is a good way to suss out hot new languages and skills.
A few years ago, when Silge noticed that Ruby on Rails was showing up in Q&A tags more often on weekdays than weekends, she realized it had shifted from a language that coders tinkered with in their spare time to part of their daily work.
Today, she says, demand for PHP, WordPress, and LAMP skills are seeing a steady decline, while newer frameworks and languages like React, Angular, and Scala are on the rise.
But it’s a constant moving target, notes Bob Melk, president of careers site Dice.
"Right now, Java and Python are really hot,” he says. “In five years they may not be. What programming languages may overtake them? Time will tell. The key is to stay on top of the data.”
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