How to choose a technology that has a future
As you build your career, you must make choices. One of the most difficult choices to make is in deciding which technologies to invest in. It is not unusual to see consultants who have invested years of their lives in a technology that will eventually be abandoned by the market or its designer. It is virtually impossible to predict the future at this level and the best strategy is to learn how to learn, and be a programmer, regardless of the technology or language. Above all it is always better to invest in things you enjoy doing. On the other hand there are simple ways to get an idea of what is in demand right now and act accordingly. Simply check for the skills that companies are currently seeking. The law of supply and demand – get it?
One effective method to get answers is to go on large sites offering jobs such as jobserve.com. At the time of writing this post, joberve.com offers no less than 14.626 jobs in IT, just for the United Kingdom! If you add other countries like the United States, France or Germany, the figure explodes. The ideal is to use a site that is popular in your region or country.
Browsing the latest offers of employment will give you a pretty good idea of what is being sought. The more criteria you add, the more accurate will be your answer. So if you can only work in the London area, there is no need to search in San Francisco. It is pretty obvious, the nature of IT projects developed in these two cities can be very different.
This research can be tedious. Fortunately, another site that offers jobs provides a faster way to determine the technology application, but at some cost. This is Careers 2.0 by StackOverflow and has an amazing technology tag feature.
I was able to obtain figures in under 5 minutes using the following technique: I created a sheet in my favorite spreadsheet. I typed each tag that I found, one after the other – for the latest 25 bids only (1 page) initially. I then aggregated the occurrences and found myself with a list of technologies and the number of times each was mentioned overall. The following result is for the latest 25 or 50 job offers near London (occurrences are in % for comparison).
I compared 25 to 50 because it is well known that the more data you have, the more accurate the result you have. With the 25 latest job offers, I got a total of 120 tags, reduced to 56 after aggregation. When I took the latest 50 job offers, I got 235 tags reduced to 89 after aggregation. You can immediately see without having to do much calculation that the latest 25 job offers is more than sufficient. Adding more offers did not change the result significantly, keeping a satisfactory validity for our purpose: having some indication of what is in demand.
Now that we have our results for Careers 2.0, can we generalize them (external validity)?
Of course not! And this is the main issue. There is an obvious website bias involved. Careers 2.0 provides us with a convenient way to test technologies thanks to their amazing tagging system, but companies posting on it are not representative. It has only 83 job offers for the London area at the time of the test (12th of July 2012). Jobserve.com on the other hand has 8,657 jobs available for the same criteria.
Careers 2.0 is growing fast, so we can expect that in a few years it will be the reference for programmer’s job vacancies and will provide more accurate data. For now, use them as an indication and nothing more. Until then, be sure to develop your ability to learn and give priority to technologies you love working with rather than just the ones that are currently in demand. Success almost guaranteed!
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Generally speaking, what we have now is that most developers begin to realize that technologies are short-lived and therefore there is little point in taking your time to become an expert in them. That leads to a nuisance career-wise as it becomes hard to get people through classical technical interviews. Back in the 90s when it was moving much much slower I could only know C++ for example and that was absolutely enough for me job-wise. You had your focus and nobody would expect you to be a jack of all trades.
Today people employ vastly varying technologies in their work and there is no time to become an expert in any of them. And frankly, there is no need. You always use like 10-20% of each of your tools only borrowing the other 80% in rare cases when it is really needed. You can do your job, you can do a lot more, you alone can sometimes replace a whole team from back from the 90s, but you can’t pass through a technical interview in the 90s style – because you haven’t had time to explore the 80% of your tools and due to the frequent alterations in your activities of those 20% your quickly forget the details of 10-15%.
I keep hearing more and more people saying something along the lines of “I can accomplish the work using the technologies in question but whenever I’m asked to do a technical interview in each of those technologies I always fail”. I suppose I too would answer most of the questions with either “I have to look it up in my projects” or “google for it”. Isn’t that funny this way?
Nevertheless I immensely enjoy being a jack of all trades and I do not miss at all the times when I was a master of one. The way I roll these days is way more satisfying. Way up from being a screw to becoming a complete mechanism. 😉
And to your second point, you may be surprised to learn that StackOverflow Careers isn’t commonly considered to be something outstanding. Some people consider it just an improvement over freelancer sites where you can get substantially more qualified but still cheap drones to work for pennies. And to my knowledge it’s only popular in US & UK. In the rest of the Europe it’s only marginally known.
Btw, from about a couple of years of my old membership on SO my career profile was only viewed 17 times, combined from the two countries where I resided. That is nothing. I guess they never made it a point to promote the project in Europe and nobody ultimately cared about it.
Anyway SO & SE have nearly ruined their reputation in the community in the last couple of years. I was surprised how many people knew it of those who even never participated in there. People continue leaving and ask to be deleted. There are blog posts now and then that talk about their bad experiences. With the project rapidly becoming irrelevant their Careers experiment will most likely not improve either.
Thanks again for your amazing contributing comments!
I agree with you, the few hundreds jobs there are for the same area (West & East coast mostly) and therefore we can say it is “too localized” 🙂