Bulldozer00's Blog

Be careful out there. If you acquire deep expertise and develop into a highly skilled worker in a narrow technical domain, you’re walking a tightrope.You may be highly valued by the marketplace today, but if your area of expertise becomes obsolete because of rapid technological change, your career may stall – or worse. On the other hand, if you luckily “choose” your narrow area of expertise correctly, your skillset may be in demand for life. It’s a classic textbook case of supply and demand.

In the software development arena, consider the ancient COBOL and C programming languages. Hundreds of millions of lines of code written in these languages are embedded in thousands of mission-critical systems deployed out in the world.  These systems need to be continuously maintained and extended in order to keep their owners in business. History has repeatedly shown that the cost, schedule, and technical risks of updating big software systems written in these languages (or any other language) are huge. Thus, because of the large numbers of systems deployed and the fact that most software engineers leave those languages behind (and stigmatize them), the supply-demand curve will be in your favor if you stick solely to COBOL or C programming out of fear of change. The tradeoff is that you’ll spend your whole career in maintenance, and you’ll rarely, if ever, experience the thrill of developing brand new systems with your old skillset.