Computer Careers Book
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Computer Careers Advice
Here're two mutually exclusive pieces of advice for
anyone taking up a computer career now.
It's not really directed toward career changers
so much as young people, who do have more options.
For instance, my niece, Catherine, who's about to enter
her third year at Brown University as a Computer Science
major. Naturally, she has never asked me for advice -- she's
doing what she wants to do. I of course am not consulted.
So you may consider this as the advice I would give her if
she actually asked for it. Which she won't, but you may benefit
from reading this.
First --
Be more than a techie. Be a techie+. By that I mean,
you'll have a lot more flexibility and career options if you
broaden your understanding of business. You'll be working
for a business large or small, and business skills are
important to every employee.
Don't get me wrong. You can have a good and satisfying
life's career as a techie just by concentrating on your techie skills.
But you may not. Because to the business, you're a tool.
Just like the punch press machine, the photocopier and the
corporate jet. You'll be there as long as you're useful and no
longer. If you wear out by allowing your skills and/or your
attitude to get rusty, they'll find a new tool to replace you.
This also applies to other technical experts such as lawyers
and accountants, but their expertise is not so quickly out of date.
So, along with your computer courses, squeeze in as many marketing,
accounting, finance and management courses as possible. Learn
how to listen and communicate effectively with customers so they
understand the benefits your company provides and you
understand their needs. That is the essence of marketing.
You also need to know how the IT department fits into business
financially. For some companies, IT is the business.For others,
it's just another expense of creating widgets.
Learn how to work with others in teams and how to manage projects
and the team members working on them. The skill of making
everybody involved with a project happy is difficult, and so
valued by wise businesses (not that all businesses are wise.)
You want to get rich like techies such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and
Larry Ellison of Oracle? Then you have to do what they
did -- add business skills to your technical expertise.
You know that Bill Gates is not the world's richest man because
he's such a great programmer. He became wealthy by learning
how to harness the programming skills of many other good to
great programmers. Learning finance, accounting, management
and especially marketing, along the way.
If you're the type of techie who says, Yechhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
I don't want to be involved with selling stuff, or handling money it's
dirty. Manage people? I like computers because I'd rather not deal
with people.
Then my advise to you is to stay with the technical stuff, but going
VERY deep into it. Don't be just another programmer. Be the best
software engineer in the world. Be such an expert in your field
that companies pay you the big bucks for your advice and even
put up with your eccentricities, because they need you. Don't
just read all the books in your field - write the best one.
If you can't give the best speech or presentation of a paper at
a professional conference, don't go. Don't be just another
MCSE -- come up with the next Windows networking breakthrough.
Don't write Java programs -- design the next generation of hot
computer languages.
Don't keep up to date on your field -- you must be the pioneer
who blazes the path to creating the next new hot computer
language or other technology. Make everybody else struggle to
keep up with you.
Catherine, I know you'll never read this. The rest of you -- hope it helps.
The computer programmng to learn as a foundation for all the others is:
C++ for Not Yet Techies
Contrarian computer careers viewpoint
This updates my article at:
Computer Careers for Not Yet Techies
Since IT employment has been in a terrible slump the last
three years or so, a lot of people may be asking whether or
not it's still worthwhile to pursue computer careers.
Let's think about it this way. The automobile quickly replaced
horses and horse-drawn carriages as the primary mode of
local transportation in the world. (And in a broad sense
I am also including buses, taxis, tuk-tuks, jeepneys and
the other variations of vehicles with engines that exist in the world.)
Yes, horse-drawn carriages still exist. Tilles Park here in
Ladue in St Louis operates carriage tours to see their
decorations in lights every year around Christmas time.
But none of those drivers make a full time living at it.
Probably a few drivers living in tourist attractions such as
Williamsburg VA and maybe even more in Europe make a
full time career out of driving such carriages. Heck, there
are even still men who pull rickshaws in Calcutta India,
but it's obviously not a lucrative or booming career.
So cars are now a huge piece of our daily lives and therefore
the national economy. They have created many thousands
of jobs from sales people to mechanics to gas station clerks etc.
I'd bet that if you could go back to the very early 20th
century you might find many young men pondering
whether it was worthwhile to learn how to fix cars for a
living or to work on Henry Ford's assembly line.
Obviously, although the economy in general and
automobile-connected jobs in particular have gone
up and down, the industry is providing a huge
number of jobs to Americans and others all around the world.
Yes, many auto assembly jobs have been lost from
Detroit, St Louis and other traditional areas to Germany,
Japan, Korea, Mexico and other places. Yet you can't fill
up with gas in Pakistan or get your oil changed in Romania.
Do any of you doubt that there will still be automobile
jobs in the near to fairly distant future? Yes, mechanics
in your grandchildren's old age may have to know more
about how hydrogen-powered engines work, but there's
still going to be a need for mechanics.
I submit the same thing will remain essentially true for
computers. They're going to continue to get smaller and
more powerful and to take on more chores and become
ever more present in our daily lives.
Do you doubt that there are going to be computer careers
available when your grandchildren turn 100?
If not, why worry about them now?
Yes, supply and demand and the general economy will
affect the labor market for techies. It will go up and down
many times. So what's new?
But people not even born yet are going to have great
computer careers, so there's no reason for you to wait for yours.
The best time to get into a field is when it's out of favor. When
the covers of TIME and NEWSWEEK are talking about the
next boom it IT in a few years -- guess what?It'll be too
late then. You need to get in now, get trained now and get
experience now.
That way, you'll be in good position to take full advantage of
the next boom in IT -- before the masses of wannabes.
