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> The same thing happens to programming positions. I can't stress how important this is. Folks going to things like boot camps or other educational outlets tha

> The same thing happens to programming positions. I can't stress how important this is. Folks going to things like boot camps or other educational outlets that focus on one language will utterly kill their career if they aren't aware of how fast things move. If you don't learn the underlying abstractions and paradigms that take various forms in different languages, you will get left in the dust in a matter of a few years. The best programmers I've ever worked with got excited about programming patterns and paradigms, not frameworks and syntactic sugar. Those are also the ones I paid the most attention to. Bottom line for both software and IT engineers: you learn to learn, not just to do.

bradfa 8y ago
Sure, there's places to learn hip new tech that might not be around for a while and you'll have to continuously learn new languages/frameworks/etc. But there's also things like FORTRAN, COBOL, and C, which are all in-demand in their own little niches, aren't going away any time soon, and where you can till make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.
- Rooster61 8y ago
  > can still make a quite good career with only knowing one of them. I think this is (at least partially) a side effect of the pedagogy of computer science in schools changing throughout the decades. When I was in school, just about the entire program stressed OOP, with very little focus on imperative/procedural programming. Newly minted programmers fresh out of school don't have the exposure/mindset to jump straight into one of these (C maybe being an exception). The old guard that called these languages home are a dying breed, and the salaries paid to program in them these days bears that out the scarcity that results.
- klodolph 8y ago
  I would say the difficulty with these niches is that the number of experts and the demand follow different curves. For COBOL, it seems that you have the initial period where supply and demand are high, and you have the final period where the few experts remaining command high salaries. But between them you have a glut where demand is dropping and the experts are moving on or getting "reorganized". Surviving that middle period is not something to take for granted.
jimbokun 8y ago
The key skill is knowing how to continuously acquire new skills.

bradfa 8y ago

Sure, there's places to learn hip new tech that might not be around for a while and you'll have to continuously learn new languages/frameworks/etc. But there's also things like FORTRAN, COBOL, and C, which are all in-demand in their own little niches, aren't going away any time soon, and where you can till make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

Rooster61 8y ago
> can still make a quite good career with only knowing one of them. I think this is (at least partially) a side effect of the pedagogy of computer science in schools changing throughout the decades. When I was in school, just about the entire program stressed OOP, with very little focus on imperative/procedural programming. Newly minted programmers fresh out of school don't have the exposure/mindset to jump straight into one of these (C maybe being an exception). The old guard that called these languages home are a dying breed, and the salaries paid to program in them these days bears that out the scarcity that results.
klodolph 8y ago
I would say the difficulty with these niches is that the number of experts and the demand follow different curves. For COBOL, it seems that you have the initial period where supply and demand are high, and you have the final period where the few experts remaining command high salaries. But between them you have a glut where demand is dropping and the experts are moving on or getting "reorganized". Surviving that middle period is not something to take for granted.

jimbokun 8y ago

The key skill is knowing how to continuously acquire new skills.