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Skills to Seek
There has been a lot of great feedback regarding skills we need to maintain or seek, and how to determine what skills we should seek. I’m glad the issue hasn’t degraded to what language is best, or better than another. That really isn’t the point here.
The key thing I am seeking are those factors that help determine the viability of a skill over time. Clearly, those languages that have the most transferable concepts to newly emerging languages may be preferred. Skills that are not language specific, such as the use of patterns in OOP or database design are also more valuable. As they are not platform specific, they have an even higher degree of transferable concepts.
Here are some reader comments from yesterday’s editorial.
Feodor:
This is a great topic, and it’s great that you are bringing it up.
I think that the most valuable quality in an IT professional (regardless if it’s a DBA, programmer, DB developer, etc.) is to grasp concepts and patterns and to be able to re-apply them in different situations in the future. (After all, everything has already been invented; innovation is just a matter of finding the right combination of previous innovations and mixing them in the right proportions.)
What I am saying is, that by being able to re-utilize concepts in a new contexts is invaluable skill. For example, I started as a .NET web developer myself, and later on I slowly moved into database design, performance tuning and data warehousing. The patterns I learned about object-oriented-ness and the different ways to group entities have helped me ever since; furthermore, I don’t see the concepts changing anytime soon, regardless of what new languages come up.
JuanJo:
I’m been working with the PB 11.2 and 11.5 and even though I realized that the whole framework is still "amateur" compared to the Highly ranked nowadays, but, 12th version seems to be trying to approach to .Net and I think that could generate some interesting concepts/ideas in the future. (I mean, PB is trying to combine their Datawindows + .Net capabilities).
What do you think about learning PowerBuilder 12.Net?
David:
We’ve been converts of Allaire’s… no Macromedia’s… no Adobe’s ColdFusion for many, many years and would highly suggest it as a next language to learn for any .net/vb people out there. Platform independence, supported by a major player,, web based/tag based and very stable.
Being in the CF realm, I’m looking for another language as well but every time I look towards the latest MS offering, the current users are complaining about radical changes to the language. Maybe I should go back to Fortran?
Editor Note:
@JuanJo: I too have a history of using PowerBuilder for some pretty powerful applications. I didn’t mention it in my examples because it is pretty much relegated to a niche market until they break the tight coupling of the data window to the database. They may have already done so; I haven’t chosen to keep current, breaking away almost ten years ago.
IMHO, I think PowerBuilder was a fantastic tool, especially running under Windows 3.1. It may be a fantastic tool today too. But I don’t know that it has maintained market share. That being the case, then is it a skill set to be sought?
I know a lot of people with COBOL expertise that are at quite a demand today, because not too many people are entering that skill set. It may be that tools like VB6, PowerBuilder, Fox Pro, Delphi, may be moving into that category. VB6 definitely so, since the code base is no longer being enhanced. But, there are a lot of companies maintaining their VB6 code based, because they have a lot of it.
@David: Many is the time I have worked hard to understand a MS framework or service, only to have it replaced a short time later with something better. When the something better is radically different, it doesn’t help much. Take, for example, the short lived Microsoft Transaction Server.
Do you have other factors you have found useful in selecting skills to be acquired? Perhaps you can share how your current skills have been enhanced through experience with other tools or practices? Send your comments to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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