Communications of the ACM
The Working Dead: It Jobs Bound For Extinction
The IT industry has seen many waves where the "next big thing" turned out to be smaller and shorter-lived than anyone expected, thanks to rapid shifts in technology. Today, automation, artificial intelligence, and services are causing some jobs to disappear and others to radically change form.
Some of today's hottest jobs, like developers and data scientists, could one day find themselves on the digital scrap heap. How you can avoid that dead end?
Specialization in a particular tech discipline, which almost guaranteed employment in the past, is now a ticket to involuntary retirement. The more closely a job is tied to a specific language, operating system, or product, the more likely it is to eventually become obsolete, says James Stanger, senior director of product development for CompTIA, an IT industry trade association.
There are far fewer opportunities than before in legacy mainframe systems, and those positions won't be around for much longer, says Elizabeth Lions, an executive coach, author, and president of Lionsology, a job leadership consultancy. "Cobol programmers are right along with them. They're becoming obsolete," Lions says. The same holds for coders weaned on C and C++, she says.
Likewise, Smalltalk, Flex, and Pascal were all commonly used languages at one time, says Geoffrey Bourne, CTO of job site Ladders.
From InfoWorld
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