Feature Disclaimer: Before taking any of my advice be aware that I once bet my career on OS/2 and that in all my careers articles my ambition is to help you avoid some of the mistakes I have made.

The Politburo at The Reg wants me to stick my neck out and show some trends in this “future” thing that young people seem so keen on nowadays. This is because I’m a headhunter and ought to have an insight into what will drive your career in coming years. But what I know is, there is no one big trend, so here’s a core dump of the threats and opportunities coming your way.

Banking and finance

Banking has plateaued big time. The biggest factor supporting the job market is the way regulators believe that quantity of regulation is a substitute for quality. The underlying profitability is fragile and if your work isn’t ultimately connected to revenue, so is your job. C++ continues to hold its own, even if the body count is down since most developers aren’t smart enough to fight the damned thing and Java has definitely peaked with C# slowly acquiring market share. This is the time, today, to start your move away from VB. It won’t die this year or next but like Jean-Luc Picard said “I am held in the grip of there being more yesterdays than tomorrows”.

A bright spot is data management. A scary/depressing percentage of bank data is in a woeful state either wrong or held in mutually incompatible silos and retail banking is at last getting a clue that maybe it should mine the vast pile of transaction data in your accounts to help sell you stuff. The whole Big Data / Data Science gig is the light in several of the tunnels I’m covering today.

BYOD

BYOD is the stupidest tech trend I’ve seen for ages.

We’ve spent the last 30 years getting our PCs standardised so they go wrong less often and are less hassle to sort out when they do. Now we support eight types of iPad, your dimwit Archos pad won’t access Google Play which has the app we rely on and I just bought a Nook with my own money.

Can you make this mess secure from hackers or stop the users nicking corporate data? Why won’t it attach to the corporate WiFi? Does the picture Mike copied onto a server of his kids in the bath count as child porn?

The list of stupid fiddly problems is endless and that’s why as your careers advisor I love BYOD, it takes us back to the 1980s when users valued the break/fix PFY who came and sorted out their tech lives. So BYOD is good if you’ve got talents in fiddling and enjoy helping users directly. It’s a good gig that will last for years.

The users are slightly less clueless

BYOD isn’t the only “empowerment” of users going on. They now have a lot more understanding of the tech than when you and I started in this game which screws with you on several levels.

They don’t understand why they can buy 16 Gb of RAM from Scan.co.uk for a few quid, but that IT wants to charge them £1200 for an upgrade. Or more accurately they *do* understand and are more able to cut up the web of cross subsidies you have woven. That’s going to hurt the IT budget, as is the fact that many IT directors know a lot less about computers than the heads of many other departments, so you are being weakened from above and below and have to try a lot harder to placate users under the guise of being “business focused”.

In City banks it is already the case that the best programmers are rarely in “central IT” since its long held policy of pay being a function of time served, where you went to university, Powerpoint/Visio skills, looking smart at meetings and “not making trouble” rather than ability to actually deliver working code means that in investment banking the best work and pay will be in “user” departments, not just trading but risk / CVA, client management/sales and tactical development.

Cloudy ops

The percentage of systems managed “by hand” is now only ever going to decrease, whether that is the fearsome complexity of dealing with the latest Windows Server/Exchange, the Cloud or a bunch of commodity Linux boxes. You have to place your career bets not only on the systems that you hope will prosper, but also the management tools.

In the SME space I’d guess the best bet is Spiceworks, which is also a defensive move if you are looking after small scale IT. There’s a lot of outfits offering to handle SME IT more cheaply for a fixed price. Yes we both know that’s a bloody lie, but they won’t be talking to you about the decision will they? Best to get a rationalisation and management programme under way soonish.

Across the board, server rationalisation is continuing to hold down the population of servers as the old habit of “one service, one server” looks increasingly quaint. We both know that in most cases “Cloud” is little more than topology and configuration requiring few new skills. I won’t tell them if you don’t, but never kid yourself that hype in this business doesn’t matter. I got accused of that in the live Careers chat last week and I proudly plead guilty of letting Reg readers grab the next wave. That relates to a blindingly obvious trend we’ve seen for a while: the bigger the thing you manage or program, the more money you get and the harder it is to get rid of you.

Oracle

For decades Oracle has been one of the best gigs for ITpros; a healthy demand for skills combined with a growth in market share and the fact that changing core database is as traumatic and risky as an organ transplant to make it one of the very few areas that could pay you for an entire career without having to scramble into another skill as it falls out of fashion. It ain’t going anywhere soon, but then again neither is Cobol.

At Oracle CloudWorld recently I observed how inward looking the firm has become. I was the only journalist there except Kate Russell from BBC Click who didn't appear to have a single critical thing to say about Oracle.

Oracle seems to have decided that nearly everyone who will ever buy their products already has, so is building them a walled garden so they can grow by lock in rather than new sales.

Although Oracle doesn’t talk to me, being a Reg writer leads people to suspect I know what is going on and maybe how they can monetise that. So over some rather good red wine, some of Oracle’s partner firms expressed the view that they should warm up their relationship with IBM who for decades has been the prey that Oracle fed upon, but IBM has now got a few managers who care more about technology than golf.

IBM wants into Decision Science big time and is throwing money at acquisitions to blast their way in so they can sell the software, a cloud to run it on and bodies to actually get it to work. Fortunately for you and the firms that want to feed on this change, IBM struggles to attract or retain the best talent these days, so the sexy work will be up for grabs and if you can trust a journalist, trust me when I say a good percentage of you will make real money for some years this way.

Go grab some of this

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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