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Reg headhunter serves up array of crystal balls

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The reason is Big Data, Analytics and Data Science in general. The VARs I drink with make their money from change. Neither they nor you get much from keeping things going. Change is not only more interesting it pays most of our mortgages.

I cover this more deeply in my Big Data article, but this area has the best growth potential out there and although there are some decent products from Teradata and Algorithmics the core is a mix of open source and sucking data out of the systems you already know and loathe. BD/DS has the joy of being visibly productive since if you do it right you get to inform important decision makers on how to make their decisions.

Since I’m being paid (a pittance) to stick my neck out, this is the area that will have the greatest percentage growth in the next few years. That time scale is important, it’s long enough for you to get up to speed before the ship sails and it matures, open source also has the advantage that you can just shove it on your home PC to learn or even find an excuse to bring the toolsets into your project without an Oracle sales rep trying to screw you.

Security

It’s not just the growth of security work that should interest you, it is the change in what employers want from it. Traditional “keep them out” work is never going away but not only does it not help the bottom line, it often reduces it. At the Gartner summit this spring, I was struck by how the smarter end of security pros are moving from blockers to enablers of new business and I really hope that it is not news to you that being part of how your firm makes money is a much better place to be than a cost centre that spends without visible effect and inevitably occasionally screws up.

This means a blurring of security roles. As a developer you must create trustworthy (not merely trusted) paths for customers through your system. Partners will get APIs with mediated access to critical information and you must become competent in managing risk, not just avoiding it. Core security on the other hand wants to expand into delivery a bit more, so there’s a race that developers will not always win.

Herfindahl’s Revenge

Why could you care less about a decline in the Herfindahl index for programming languages ?

It’s a measure of the concentration of market share and its decline is a threat to your career. For a long time the number of “mainstream” programming environments has been going up. At one time half of all programmers did Cobol in an IBM style environment. VB helped end that even though at its peak never made it past 25 per cet which is ahead of where Java is today. But to make it as a VB programmer you usually had to suss out SQL and today there are not only more languages in use, but most programmers have to use multiple languages in any given job. Java is now near its peak in market share and supply/demand is a lagging term, since it has been popular almost all newbies learn it which means the number of Java coders will go up for years whatever happens to the demand for them.

This all adds up to hard choices when your main language starts to go out of fashion. Note I say “starts”. The time to jump ship needs to be finely judged partly because the next big thing might fizzle, Ruby and Scala have had decent growth, but are a long way from taking over the world.

Hardware maintenance

The nearest thing I have to good news on fixing sick machines is that it is not possible to offshore the work, which puts something of a floor on the long term relative decline in pay and job security.

The move away from reassuringly expensive hardware like Sun towards commodity X86 and more recently energy efficient ARM servers means ever fewer things are worth fixing even though Big Data is pushing up the number of units.

Energy management itself is drifting up for several reasons. In the UK we’ve now hit the point that no matter what energy source we use, we can’t build the power stations to serve the demand in future years. In almost all western countries the infrastructure is out of date and becoming less reliable and prices are going to go up hard, so there will be harsh pressure to both use less power and to cope better with blackouts. The hardest hit will be SMEs who often have little or no UPS capability and for whom a couple of days not being able to function could be fatal, some of you will make money helping them.

One curiously undocumented area of expansion is local computer fixers, who will sort out hardware and software hassles for consumers, homeworkers and the sort of SME that can’t justify any sort of IT expertise in house. They resell upgrades with installation and deliver the sort of service the big boys like Dixons claim but don’t deliver. As more people work at home and since the number of computers / consoles / tablets in many houses is two or three times the number of people, that might be something for you to look at.

Contracting is expanding

A near-term trend is that the contract market is improving nicely, since headcount freezes are still in force and more work is being done, but of course it will be the first to hit the fan when the next downturn comes. Which it will.

One side effect of the noise about senior execs at the BBC and other semi-state outfits using personal service companies is that IT contractors are less welcome and that to “save money” the same people come in through the well connected body shops who resell their time with a healthy margin added.

It’s hard to call what is happening in the big picture in government IT, the consensus in the political types I occasionally talk to seems invariably that gov.uk projects are like war, a futile and tragic waste of resources, but they want to cut costs which implies automation.

It's entirely likely that on a given tender, 95 per cent of the weighting is price, 5 per cent quality. This makes the <1 per cent of horse found in Tesco burgers look quite appetising.

How to deal with the future

My conclusion is simple. You need to spend a bit more on keeping your skills nearer the edge. A few manuals wouldn’t go amiss and that’s best done in the good times. Waiting for your speciality to go titsup is the cause of some of the more miserable people who get in contact with me for help.

The final trend I’ll leave you with is paper. I know a lot of Reg readers aren’t in any way qualified to do their jobs, have no certificates and often sneery about CompSci degrees. But as a rapidly growing percentage of the competitors for the job you want have bits of paper that say they are competent, there’s little option but to play that game at least a little. ®

Dominic Connor is a City Headhunter, formerly an occasionally competent CIO, developer and lecturer in C++, expert witness and can be found twittering at : https://twitter.com/DominicConnor1

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