Being an IT Dinosaur

"When you are finished changing, you are finished".
Benjamin Franklin

Becoming a dinosaur

It is 2023 now that I am writing these lines and I am 53 years old. I have been working professionally for 30 years as a computer programmer.

After high school I studied computer science where I learned how to program in GW-Basic , Turbo-Pascal, Turbo-C, COBOL, Prolog, in DOS environment as well in Unix and got my bachelor at 21. I have been working from my 23. But I have also been interested in coding from my high school years using Locomotive basic and other coding languages even more “exotic” for youngsters. What’s driven me was the never-ending wonder of discovering almost like playing a mythical RPG game.

All this time I have seen the scenery in IT changing drastically and always on the move. I was following the river flow for all that time but in later years something happened.
I was growing heavy and not able to catch up with the flow. Usually, I knew most of new technologies and now I could not catch up. It seemed like new technologies, frameworks and computer languages were being released every day.

The burst in different types of IT technology was too much for me. Alas I was trapped in companies that were not wise enough to embrace new technologies and were using old or even sometimes obsolete tools and had no personal time for any innovation.

I had no problem at that time and felt secure, I thought, there were plenty of opportunities out there. But I was diving deeper and deeper to tech oblivion following the tools and technologies I have been using all these years…

I was a Dinosaur and didn’t even know it!

Why is this happening to me?

Am I the only one this has happened to? I’m a smart person, when did I lose it?

I would like to point out that the above is not at all a rare situation, and I have a very strong feeling that junior programmers, engineers if you prefer, of nowadays will be as well hit from it in the future.

It is something that has nothing to do with you or your age. It is because the whole market keeps changing, keeps shifting.
Companies, technologies, products, entire markets can become dinosaurs!

When we start our careers, we believe that we have the right degree for our employment opportunities and most probably we do.
Especially for a programming engineer is a commitment to the world of technology. Most software engineers work and find great personal satisfaction in inspiring others and/or producing code themselves that can accomplish something.

Every now and then (!) new technologies arise, and you find the time to study, get prepared and utilize them.
But it is quite impossible to know where the market heads to, and when there are many different routes to follow, especially in fast-moving IT, there comes great uncertainty.

When you are young you have got, and you can follow not one but enough of them. But as IT splits more and more into different “flavors” you cannot even have knowledge of the existence of many of them.

So, you follow what you feel is most profitable, enjoyable, intriguing ... take a pick. You obtain most of the experience that you can get out of your choices and become a master of them.

But what if your routes of choice go to the end of their life?
Are you going to follow them to extinction like a real dinosaur?

What now?

Think of yourself as software, one of the many you wrote in the past.

• Software with no updates suffers.
• Software with continuous updates tends to live somewhat longer.
• Software with continuous updates and new features goes even further but finally suffers in structure whatever best architecture may have been used.

No Software that is considered reliable and especially efficient lives forever.

The only Software that can dominate the market is the re-written one based previous experience and new better technologies.

The answer is so obvious, in fact it was with you all these years.
You have experience, but you lack knowledge of the latest technologies.

Rewriting yourself.

You must upgrade and strengthen your development skills.
Here are some examples of how you can do it:

• Online Courses. Lot of sites offer nowadays courses that can strengthen your knowledge on new technologies.
• Books. Yes, the classic old tool that used to accompany you all these years still exists!
• It channels. User groups, videos and podcasts can offer great skill enhancements.
• Articles. Millions of them for every taste.
• Mentoring. The real power of knowledge transfer. Do not hesitate to ask for a mentor and of course become a mentor yourself.
• Ask for help. Maybe really embarrassing asking for help from 10 or more years younger colleagues repeatedly but most of them are willing to do so.

No matter what method of learning works for you, the important thing is to keep at it.

Dare It !

If you are not self-employed find a company that will appreciate your knowledge and can offer you an environment to learn new technologies.

I am a live example of this. The previous year i have accumulated knowledge of newest .Net framework, TC, Git, Docker, Kubernetes and more!

Epilogue

Rex, never forget. It's not the number of technologies you know and master that makes you a senior developer, it is just the way you can handle things.

END PROGRAM BEING_AN_IT_DINOSAUR.

;-)