December 6, 2016 at 13:31What could be the job of an IT professional of the future
In our blog on Habré, we talk about what will make the work of a novice programmer more effective , and even give harmful advice in the form of practical manuals like " How to get a programmer out of yourself. " Today we decided to look at how today's IT professions can change.
There are very different forecasts, but one thing is certain - computer science will not go anywhere. The director of the American Development Center, Lisette Partelow , writes at the end of her article that their study is not tied to code as such, it provides a more general and wider range of knowledge, so no matter what scenario the world develops, such skills can be applied in many different professions in the future. / photo Judit Klein CC
The Code.org project is aimed at popularizing programming among children and adults , which is supported by many famous people (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg) and companies (Amazon, Google and others). InfoWorld editors write that in the near future almost everyone will know how to program. In addition to the courses, perhaps discipline will become a mandatory part of the elementary school curriculum: last year such a subject was scheduled in the UK. All this will significantly increase the IT literacy of the population.
Both a child and an adult without special education can program the robot today. Such an opportunitygives, for example, EZ Robot. To do this, you will first need to assemble it from plastic parts as a designer. The manual also contains information on how to train the robot. But the author of the project says that the most ordinary people who are not engineers were able to teach the robot completely different things. For example, the instructions did not say exactly how to train the robot to pour wine into glasses. And a 13-year-old teenager needed only 4 hours to assemble a robot and program it using a telephone to distribute water to the developers' office.
Chris Granger, founder of the QuickBase platform and former PM at Microsoft, considers his main goal to teach writers, biologists, and accountants to use computers to solve their problems. Today there are a lot of such platforms and all of them are called to help non-programmers. Tyler Cowen, an American economist, writes in his book “Average is Over” that, with these skills, people will be able to apply them in their fields of activity.
For example, a doctor who uses computer programs to make a more accurate diagnosis or a sales manager who can filter customer data for more efficient work will be more in line with the realities of the future.
But it is unlikely that any of these “specialists” will be able to become a full-fledged programmer, because it is one thing to write a couple of lines of code or to master a program, and quite another to build a fully working system. But such people can work in the technical field, for example, become a software engineer, Michael J. Coren, the author of this articles.
The number of programmers around the world has already reached 15 million (see the "All this could be yours" section in a BBC article on the future of programming). But their number is growing differently in different countries: for example, India annually graduates 100 thousand specialists in the field of computer science, and Britain - only 10 thousand. Therefore, even children's programming courses are actively developing today. In particular, a former Google and Amazon employee, Vikas Gupta, founded the Wonder Workshop in Silicon Valley back in 2012, where children are taught how to write code. And on the MIT platform with Scratch language adapted for children, 6.2 million users are registered today. Therefore, the number of specialists in the future will only grow.
The need for the services of professional programmers is unlikely to disappear in the future: today there are more and more new languages that are developed in corporations. For example, Facebook created the Hack language, in addition to it there are Go (Google), Rust (Mozilla) and many others. Of course, languages are created not only by IT giants, but also by simple programmers. New languages are needed to fill the gaps in the application of existing ones.
The emergence of completely new languages or the development of existing ones may be associated with the introduction of new technologies. For example, the editors of Fast Company believe that the widespread adoption of cloud infrastructure has largely influenced the modern world of languages (for more details, see the “New infrastructure” in the source) What exactly will affect languages in the future is difficult to predict now, but one thing is certain for sure - working with existing languages and developing new ones will remain with technical specialists.
Today, we can distinguish areas that in the near future will need IT specialists. One of the directions of the development of professions in such areas, which will only be strengthened in the future, is specialization. For example, today, such a direction as exchange analysis is developing. A specialist in this profile (the so-called quantum - from the English quant) is essentially a programmer in the financial field.
Tyler Olsen, a junior consultant and software engineer at Daugherty Business Solutions, calls speed one of the most important aspects of work, especially in HFT companies. In his opinion, no other languages can be compared with C and C ++ in this yet. But one of Goldman’s executives, Sax Raj Mahajan, tellsabout the possible directions of development in the field of financial services, including electronization, a new generation of market makers and market changes that will be caused by quanta. At least until 2020, quanta will be in trend, so some changes in this area may well occur.
Another promising area for programmers is consulting. Cliff Justice, Head of Corporate Services and Consulting Outsourcing at KPMG, explains the demand for analysts with the ever-increasing amount of data collected and the number of technologies being deployed. Therefore, the company will recruit more and more database architects, data integration specialists, and IT planners.
Christian P. Hagen, the head of strategic IT planning at another consulting company, AT Kearney, names Hadoop developers, database engineers, big data and enterprise database developers among the technical experts that are in demand in the future. In addition, he predicts the emergence of managerial technical positions: the head of the analytics department, the head of the database department, the head of the digital technology department, the head of the business intelligence department and the vice president of the corporate data department will be excellent career opportunities for technical specialists.
In addition, information protection specialists in completely different areas will be in demand: from the financial sector to the state and medicine. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of vacancies in the field of information protection by 2024 will increase by 18% and amount to 97,700 jobs.
In addition, new professions will appear in other areas that are developing today. For example, the Internet of things is gaining momentum. By 2020, there will be a network of 24 billion items (IoT), and investment in the industry over the next five years will amount to 6 trillion dollars. But the approach to programming in this area is significantly different from "traditional" programming. Different approaches need to be applied to solve the problems of working with a limited amount of memory and low processor speed, energy consumption and radio communications.
In 2015, only in the USA, 10 thousand vacancies in the field were available.Internet of things (Internet of Things), and that number will only grow. The need for professionals from related fields will also grow: for example, General Electric plans to develop areas of work with big data, data analysis, built-in smart sensors, remote control systems to achieve success in the field of the Internet of things.
Another promising area is artificial intelligence and robotics. By 2020, cognitive analytics, intelligent automation, parallel processing of information will become more developed areas of AI and lead to the beginning of the era of automation. According to Gartner, in 2018, about 3 million workers will work under the leadership of the “boss robot”.
The Cliff Justice of KPMG already mentioned by us,notes that IT professionals will be in great demand and will be directly involved in programming, integration and construction of infrastructure for organizational applications for AI and robotics. But there is another opinion : Mike Dannheim, co-founder of Sensei and 1Aperion, believes that machines will become so smart that they themselves can engage in the development of AI, without the help of scientists.
Cloud technology will also continue to evolve. Experts name three main areas - the growth of the use of hybrid cloud services, the introduction of BYOD policies and the emergence of a larger number of cloud brokers (CSB). Gartner expects over the next five yearsstrong growth of the cloud industry: about $ 1 trillion will be spent on the transition to cloud technologies, which will make them one of the largest items of IT spending since the beginning of the digital era.
Therefore, specialists expect vacancies related to cloud capacity management. Mike Sutcliff, director of the Accenture Digital group of companies, believes that due to the transition of companies to a hybrid environment, the question will quickly arise of quickly switching from a private to a public cloud for data processing and storage. This will cause demand for new technologies and specialties that are absent so far in most companies. Sutcliff also predicts the demand for certain languages (Perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Python, Java and JavaScript) and specialists with skills in developing API and DevOps.
A little about our project ( 1cloud ) on Habré:
And we also collect these digests:
There are very different forecasts, but one thing is certain - computer science will not go anywhere. The director of the American Development Center, Lisette Partelow , writes at the end of her article that their study is not tied to code as such, it provides a more general and wider range of knowledge, so no matter what scenario the world develops, such skills can be applied in many different professions in the future. / photo Judit Klein CC
Affordable Programming
The Code.org project is aimed at popularizing programming among children and adults , which is supported by many famous people (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg) and companies (Amazon, Google and others). InfoWorld editors write that in the near future almost everyone will know how to program. In addition to the courses, perhaps discipline will become a mandatory part of the elementary school curriculum: last year such a subject was scheduled in the UK. All this will significantly increase the IT literacy of the population.
Both a child and an adult without special education can program the robot today. Such an opportunitygives, for example, EZ Robot. To do this, you will first need to assemble it from plastic parts as a designer. The manual also contains information on how to train the robot. But the author of the project says that the most ordinary people who are not engineers were able to teach the robot completely different things. For example, the instructions did not say exactly how to train the robot to pour wine into glasses. And a 13-year-old teenager needed only 4 hours to assemble a robot and program it using a telephone to distribute water to the developers' office.
Chris Granger, founder of the QuickBase platform and former PM at Microsoft, considers his main goal to teach writers, biologists, and accountants to use computers to solve their problems. Today there are a lot of such platforms and all of them are called to help non-programmers. Tyler Cowen, an American economist, writes in his book “Average is Over” that, with these skills, people will be able to apply them in their fields of activity.
For example, a doctor who uses computer programs to make a more accurate diagnosis or a sales manager who can filter customer data for more efficient work will be more in line with the realities of the future.
But it is unlikely that any of these “specialists” will be able to become a full-fledged programmer, because it is one thing to write a couple of lines of code or to master a program, and quite another to build a fully working system. But such people can work in the technical field, for example, become a software engineer, Michael J. Coren, the author of this articles.
Only programmers in code
The number of programmers around the world has already reached 15 million (see the "All this could be yours" section in a BBC article on the future of programming). But their number is growing differently in different countries: for example, India annually graduates 100 thousand specialists in the field of computer science, and Britain - only 10 thousand. Therefore, even children's programming courses are actively developing today. In particular, a former Google and Amazon employee, Vikas Gupta, founded the Wonder Workshop in Silicon Valley back in 2012, where children are taught how to write code. And on the MIT platform with Scratch language adapted for children, 6.2 million users are registered today. Therefore, the number of specialists in the future will only grow.
The need for the services of professional programmers is unlikely to disappear in the future: today there are more and more new languages that are developed in corporations. For example, Facebook created the Hack language, in addition to it there are Go (Google), Rust (Mozilla) and many others. Of course, languages are created not only by IT giants, but also by simple programmers. New languages are needed to fill the gaps in the application of existing ones.
The emergence of completely new languages or the development of existing ones may be associated with the introduction of new technologies. For example, the editors of Fast Company believe that the widespread adoption of cloud infrastructure has largely influenced the modern world of languages (for more details, see the “New infrastructure” in the source) What exactly will affect languages in the future is difficult to predict now, but one thing is certain for sure - working with existing languages and developing new ones will remain with technical specialists.
Special programming
Today, we can distinguish areas that in the near future will need IT specialists. One of the directions of the development of professions in such areas, which will only be strengthened in the future, is specialization. For example, today, such a direction as exchange analysis is developing. A specialist in this profile (the so-called quantum - from the English quant) is essentially a programmer in the financial field.
Tyler Olsen, a junior consultant and software engineer at Daugherty Business Solutions, calls speed one of the most important aspects of work, especially in HFT companies. In his opinion, no other languages can be compared with C and C ++ in this yet. But one of Goldman’s executives, Sax Raj Mahajan, tellsabout the possible directions of development in the field of financial services, including electronization, a new generation of market makers and market changes that will be caused by quanta. At least until 2020, quanta will be in trend, so some changes in this area may well occur.
Another promising area for programmers is consulting. Cliff Justice, Head of Corporate Services and Consulting Outsourcing at KPMG, explains the demand for analysts with the ever-increasing amount of data collected and the number of technologies being deployed. Therefore, the company will recruit more and more database architects, data integration specialists, and IT planners.
Christian P. Hagen, the head of strategic IT planning at another consulting company, AT Kearney, names Hadoop developers, database engineers, big data and enterprise database developers among the technical experts that are in demand in the future. In addition, he predicts the emergence of managerial technical positions: the head of the analytics department, the head of the database department, the head of the digital technology department, the head of the business intelligence department and the vice president of the corporate data department will be excellent career opportunities for technical specialists.
In addition, information protection specialists in completely different areas will be in demand: from the financial sector to the state and medicine. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of vacancies in the field of information protection by 2024 will increase by 18% and amount to 97,700 jobs.
Other trends
In addition, new professions will appear in other areas that are developing today. For example, the Internet of things is gaining momentum. By 2020, there will be a network of 24 billion items (IoT), and investment in the industry over the next five years will amount to 6 trillion dollars. But the approach to programming in this area is significantly different from "traditional" programming. Different approaches need to be applied to solve the problems of working with a limited amount of memory and low processor speed, energy consumption and radio communications.
In 2015, only in the USA, 10 thousand vacancies in the field were available.Internet of things (Internet of Things), and that number will only grow. The need for professionals from related fields will also grow: for example, General Electric plans to develop areas of work with big data, data analysis, built-in smart sensors, remote control systems to achieve success in the field of the Internet of things.
Another promising area is artificial intelligence and robotics. By 2020, cognitive analytics, intelligent automation, parallel processing of information will become more developed areas of AI and lead to the beginning of the era of automation. According to Gartner, in 2018, about 3 million workers will work under the leadership of the “boss robot”.
The Cliff Justice of KPMG already mentioned by us,notes that IT professionals will be in great demand and will be directly involved in programming, integration and construction of infrastructure for organizational applications for AI and robotics. But there is another opinion : Mike Dannheim, co-founder of Sensei and 1Aperion, believes that machines will become so smart that they themselves can engage in the development of AI, without the help of scientists.
Cloud technology will also continue to evolve. Experts name three main areas - the growth of the use of hybrid cloud services, the introduction of BYOD policies and the emergence of a larger number of cloud brokers (CSB). Gartner expects over the next five yearsstrong growth of the cloud industry: about $ 1 trillion will be spent on the transition to cloud technologies, which will make them one of the largest items of IT spending since the beginning of the digital era.
Therefore, specialists expect vacancies related to cloud capacity management. Mike Sutcliff, director of the Accenture Digital group of companies, believes that due to the transition of companies to a hybrid environment, the question will quickly arise of quickly switching from a private to a public cloud for data processing and storage. This will cause demand for new technologies and specialties that are absent so far in most companies. Sutcliff also predicts the demand for certain languages (Perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Python, Java and JavaScript) and specialists with skills in developing API and DevOps.
A little about our project ( 1cloud ) on Habré:
- Customer Orientation as the Basis of Business: Experience of 1cloud IaaS Provider
- A bit about security in the cloud: Experience with the 1cloud IaaS provider
- How to make virtual infrastructure more accessible
And we also collect these digests: