A very strange thing happened in the mid 90's. Software Engineering fell out of favor at major universities across the U.S. About 10 years later at a Microsoft conference I attended they spoke about the upcoming shortage of software engineers.
Couple that with the demand of today's smart end users, and we now have a very good situation for Software Engineers. A demand as never before.
Golden Handcuffs
Is a term used for those of us who feel comfortable in our current position. We don't feel the need to continually improve. Our salary is acceptable, we love our environment, our manager is great!
The problem is, our skills are in an exponential decline. Golden Handcuffs are a sure way to become unmarketable. It allows us to ignore the advances in Software Engineering.
What Color is Your Parachute
The infamous book's "What Color is your Parachute" most profound advice may be paraphrased:
"If you aren't adding new skills every 6 months to your resume, you will be driven out of the market".
Who Moved My Cheese
Is an expose on the fast changing world.
We must learn to accept change and make the best of it.
Enough on the theory stuff, don't waste too much time with these books until you are in a job and want to start long term planning.
Stay Focused
Software Engineers are saddled with frequent interruptions. They come from every angle : Managers, Business Analysts, Peers, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Product Owners.
The Agile Manifesto attempts to address this problem by defining a stay focused methodology. While not perfect, it's better than the way things were using SDLC.
Become a part of the Demand
Go to Stack Overflow look up React, how many questions did you see? How about Azure? or GraphQL? Then Look at JavaScript and or Typescript. Now compare these to Java and C#. See any trends?
The top 4 Languages
Here's the top 4 languages by number of questions on Stack Overflow
The good news is that if you know JavaScript, learning Typescript is easy. If you know Java, learning C# is easy.
Most Loved Frameworks
The Stack Overflow developer survey of 2020 listed these web frameworks as most loved by 'Professional Developers':
Cloud Revenue for 2020
Microservices are going to become a major disrupter to how things are done. They will displace Express and ASP.NET.
Top Skills to learn today
React and GraphQL, JavaScript and Azure are the top skills to learn today.
Stay focused and study 8 to 10 hours a day and weekends too. Make yourself sick of studying.
This is the fastest way to be "In Demand"
JWP2021 Software Engineering
Oldest comments (7)
This is interesting:
"When one works in Software Engineering they are most likely going to develop ADD."
Has this been scientifically proven to be a kind of a side effect on software engineering?
Thank you for doing that; I think it’s unhelpful to portray neurological conditions as funny in and of themselves 💜
Article updated
Thanks man, I read both parts and this is exactly what I needed. I believe that the next upgrade for the people in this day and age is being disconnected, ignoring the information overload and focusing on a very few things just like you emphasized.
I think in order to thrive in today's world, we need to keep on simplifying things rather than making them complex and then confusion movement for progress.
Again, thanks a lot for your time. :)
If you want to be ahead of the trend I'd suggest learning Rust. They've finally split away from Mozilla as their own foundation and legal entity. I'm seeing an uptick in demand in the market and even parts of Windows and Apples OS are being rewritten using it. Big things coming for Rust.
Yes, Rust and Python are two big players today. I was surprised to read some of Microsoft engineers used it to fix long standing issues in Win32 land.