Keeping up Professionally

[Ace Pace]

A question aimed at the different board members who work in IT, is how do you keep up with developments in your field?
Do you dedicate time during the work week to stay up to date? Weekends? Or not bother and stick with the fundamentals + whatever you require in your day to day job?

This isn't just aimed at programmers, though their answers would be the most relevant to me.

*This could probably be in OT, but I'm mostly curious about people working with computers as their primary job.

[Starglider]

A question aimed at the different board members who work in IT, is how do you keep up with developments in your field?

When I see an interesting technology I download the SDK, sometimes buy a book on it, mess around with it a bit.

Do you dedicate time during the work week to stay up to date? Weekends?

I will say that I have no compunction about listing technologies I haven't used commercially on my CV (not that I've had to do this for years now). I won't claim that I have years of experience in something that I haven't used, but HR drones are incapable of comprehending the fact that good IT people can pick up new languages/libraries/etc in less than a month, and if they're going to insist on a fanatical devotion to lists of meaningless buzzwords, I am quite happy to feed them buzzwords until they choke.

[phongn]

I will say that I have no compunction about listing technologies I haven't used commercially on my CV (not that I've had to do this for years now). I won't claim that I have years of experience in something that I haven't used, but HR drones are incapable of comprehending the fact that good IT people can pick up new languages/libraries/etc in less than a month, and if they're going to insist on a fanatical devotion to lists of meaningless buzzwords, I am quite happy to feed them buzzwords until they choke.

Required: 5 years experience with Windows Server 2008.

[AMT]

I will say that I have no compunction about listing technologies I haven't used commercially on my CV (not that I've had to do this for years now). I won't claim that I have years of experience in something that I haven't used, but HR drones are incapable of comprehending the fact that good IT people can pick up new languages/libraries/etc in less than a month, and if they're going to insist on a fanatical devotion to lists of meaningless buzzwords, I am quite happy to feed them buzzwords until they choke.

Required: 5 years experience with Windows Server 2008.

Why does that not surprise me that such a requirement exists for several jobs in our profession?

[Darth Paul]

I guess it depends on what your ambitions are, but IMO, just doing your job (even well) within the confines of its current technology is a really dangerous rut to sink into - you will end up being perfectly qualified for exactly one job - the one you are being downsized from.

As you know, it is really difficult and slow to apply new technology or ideas to production software once it is in the wild. We have had a lot of success in bringing new concepts and technology into our supporting infrastructure such as automated testing, builds, build system reporting, instead. Look for stupid stuff you are spending a lot of time on and automate it using something cool - in my domain, we get pretty large customer data models, so we have built some automated tools to evaluate code changes against them, and to pick certain details & metrics out of them. I was able to learn a lot of web stuff on what was at the time a Windows only C++ project. This kind of stuff can be sold to the bosses when you can show that it provides value to the project/company and also gives the opportunity to raise the bar for the whole team.

If you can make the time, a few hours of your own time focused to play with new technologies will put you ahead of probably 90% of your peers. The same thing goes for reading good books, sadly. This naturally gets harder to do as life goes on. You can't really keep up with everything because the "IT" domain has expanded in so many directions. Absolutely list self-study and hobby things on your CV. On the hiring side (on the odd occasion we actually get to hire that is), I'm equally sure that the HR screener has dutifully shredded the resume of the next John Carmack because he didn't list J2EE 7.27 on his skills list.

In addition to SDKs, there are a lot of great open source projects in just about every domain. You can get actively involved in them or just incorporate them into your own projects and pick up good (and bad!) design ideas.

[Starglider]

Everyone says that the industry is 'fast moving' but it isn't that fast. All the big things happening now are over ten years old, and all them are built on the same concepts that have been around for at least another ten. If you know your basics, you can apply it to new stuff very rapidly.

IT has the same problems of fads and lack of institutional memory as most other technical fields, exacerbated by the short half-life of IT companies. This results in the same ideas being recast, rebranded and retried over and over, on about a ten year cycle. It's not all bad, because sometimes bad ideas can become good ideas due to hardware or network progress.

One of the things I personally find very annoying is the constant pointless churn of libraries and 'development paradigms', which is all really quite superficial and trivial changes masked in huge clouds of buzzwords. The impression I get is that lots of mediocre programmers are trying to pretend that they're making huge strides and sweeping changes, of the sort that we saw through the 60s, 70s and 80s. In actual fact, the tools available for software engineering stagnated in the 90s, and for the last ten years there have been no basic improvements, just minor refinements and major rebranding. The basic reason being that few people are qualified or motivated to tackle the hard problems of further development automation, so they flail around uselessly, recreate work done in the 80s (usually out of ignorance - interest in the history of computer science is a minority passtime among programmers), give it a slick logo and pretend it's hot shit.

There's still lots of interesting and radical technical progress going on in gaming, but I'm not sure how much longer that can continue under the current industry paradigm (ever more movie like).

[Zac Naloen]

I'm a technician, not a developer.

Learning new stuff for me is getting the right proprietry screw driver and have the correct microsoft qualification to prove I know how to use the latest OS. Luckily I don't have to pay for these things otherwise it would be damned expensive to keep my industry qualifications up to date.


X number of years using X system has always been annoying, but it was the HR drones want. I haven't been in the business long enough to for the level of jobs that require server experience yet anyway.


Although I haven't met a system that hasn't taken me more than a to learn enough to get by until I can sort out some proper training, and there is always google if I get stuck.

[Xon]

Required: 5 years experience with Windows Server 2008.

Windows 2008 didn't even exist then!

Beta 1 was released 27 July 2005, slightly more than 4 years ago!!!

[SCRawl]

Required: 5 years experience with Windows Server 2008.

Windows 2008 didn't even exist then!

Beta 1 was released 27 July 2005, slightly more than 4 years ago!!!

I think that that was the point -- it's an absurd standard for experience using a certain platform, made obviously so by the fact that it's impossible.

[Xon]

I think that that was the point -- it's an absurd standard for experience using a certain platform, made obviously so by the fact that it's impossible.

I know there is one job advert at a local university CompSci student common room asking for at least 5 years experiance in about 5 things.

It is insane.

[Spyder]

A question aimed at the different board members who work in IT, is how do you keep up with developments in your field?
Do you dedicate time during the work week to stay up to date? Weekends? Or not bother and stick with the fundamentals + whatever you require in your day to day job?

This isn't just aimed at programmers, though their answers would be the most relevant to me.

*This could probably be in OT, but I'm mostly curious about people working with computers as their primary job.

Depends on your area. In desktop land it's important to know what something is capable of in order to design and reccommend a particular solution, the knowledge on how to build and maintain your solution becomes important when it's time to build your Proof Of Concept, that's when you start going over documentation and spending time learning the finer points of whatever system you're trying to build.

You get things like vendor product demos, day courses and other learning excercises to help you on your way. The main thing is just maintaining familiarity with what's out there.

[Spyder]

I think that that was the point -- it's an absurd standard for experience using a certain platform, made obviously so by the fact that it's impossible.

I know there is one job advert at a local university CompSci student common room asking for at least 5 years experiance in about 5 things.

It is insane.

Wanted: Web Developer

Must be expert in HTML and have their MCSE.