Ten Dying IT Skills

The main problem with the article Ten Dying IT Skills is sloppiness. The author, Linda Leung, is apparently not knowledgeable enough in the areas she writes about, hence the weird choice for list items, hence the complete mess in the explanation.

Take (3), for instance. ‘Microsoft eventually replaced J++ with Microsoft .Net.’ It is plain impossible to replace a language (J++) by a platform (.NET). J++ has been superseded by J#, MS VS 6.0 grew up to be become MS VS .NET, and the underlying infrastructure is CLI instead of JVM (if anyone cares). Even then, why is this a ‘dying skill’? One of the main design goals for J# was to make a language that would allow experienced Java programmers to develop software for .NET. If you possess a good knowledge of J++, it’s not a problem to find a job as a J# programmer.

Now take (6). She maintains that Extreme Programming is a dying skill, which is utter nonsense. From the article it seems that XP is dead since 2003. In reality, Agile Manifesto has been published in 2001 and the methodology only began blooming ever since. ‘Losing ground due to the proliferation of offshore outsourcing of applications development’ also seems unlikely—outsourcing or in-house development, but the software needs to be developed and go through its life-cycle, which is almost never waterfall nowadays. XP is not the only rapid application development/agile software development method, by the way, there’s also Scrum, DSDM, FDD and many others. Even on Twitter, look at @KentBeck, @WardCunningham, @RonJeffries, etc, they are all alive and kicking liek whoa. Look at Ruby on Rails, for crying out loud! If that’s not hot, I don’t know what is. In modern language engineering DSLs also tend to be produced in an iterative fashion.

Skip to (9). I fail to see how the conclusion that HTML is a dying skill is drawn from the fact that ‘good grasp of HTML isn't the only skill required of a Web developer’. Sure, it’s not the only one, but a crucial one. Yes, no-one is writing HTML in text editors anymore like we did ten and fifteen years ago. However, the value of validation and conformance has been understood and appreciated since then, and there are so many HTML embedded languages and technologies—like PHP or ASP—that are simply dangerous to use without HTML knowledge. Bottom line: HTML is not a dying skill, it’s an absolute must. A ‘web programmer’ that states (s)he doesn’t know HTML will never get it to a job interview, (s)he will be scratched out at the first line of HR folks by a big fat red marker. Don’t call us, we’ll call you (or maybe not).

And, finally, (10), the good old Cobol. Leave Cobol alone! Oops, I meant, stop bashing it! A lot of people have been talking for decades about how dead Cobol is, and those are the same people that use hole in the wall machines, ticket booking services and other Cobol applications on a daily basis. Their salary is surely being calculated either in Cobol or in ABAP (which is another step from Cobol to hell). Nobody seems to be aware that most business-critical software is run in Cobol. Why? Because it works. It just works. And I’m not talking about some legacy systems that maintenance programmers are afraid to touch—I’ve been to a couple of Cobol conferences and talked to people from industry (IBM, ABN AMRO, ING Group, Micro Focus, SOGETI, Getronics-PinkRoccade, etc), they are well aware of all pros and cons, and they want to stick to Cobol, at least for backend. SOA is not used to get rid of Cobol, but rather to support it and to introduce new interfaces to the same applications. New applications are being developed in Cobol, too. It takes a lot of time to train a Cobol programmer, and let’s be honest, it is not the most exciting job in the world, but there’s always a market for that, and Cobol programmers and mainframe experts are paid much, much better than Java programmers. Not the least reason for that is the constant lack of new blood.