Change Management in Software Skill...

1960's till '80 saw the birth of programming languages like COBOL, PASCAL, C, PROLOG, SQL, BASIC, SMALLTALK. Then came '80s and a paradigm shift occurred and we got Object Oriented Technology and saw the birth of C++, Objective C, etc. Then came '90s and the age of internet started. New programming languages like Java, R, Haskel, Python, Javascript came in the horizon. Then 2000s came and support for concurrent programming, distributed programming, meta programming and aspect oriented programming became essential and we got languages like C#, SCALA, Go, DART, SWIFT. In the meantime people like me who started their IT journey with C++, VC++, MFC, VB on Windows platform had to realign their skillsets to match the market demand and started working on Mobility, Cloud etc. Now another shift in the market demand will see the rise in technologists working on AI, Computer Vision, IOT, Industrial IOT, predictive analytics and so on. So you see for an IT engineer there is no time to rest... He has to upskill himself continuously or else he will become obsolete... Its not easy but thats what the market demands... No wonder IT people in India who are in the age bracket of 40-55 and probably started their IT career on Windows based desktop applications and could not float well with the everchanging IT skills are feeling the heat now... The kind of job profile these people have is sometimes more managerial and people management than playing with technology... Naturally we are experiencing the massive job cuts for these category of people... Without the proper social support it will be really difficult...

We will also have to see if our academic institutions are capable of handling this change management... I am not sure but when i last saw the question papaer of GATE exmas of CS in 2011, it mainly concentrated on procedural language like C. Even when i train undergraduate students, they say they are becoming master in C to qualify the GATE exam. I know C is omnipresent but with the change in the IT scenario other aspects of software designing using Object Oriented Programming or Aspect oriented Programming should also take a major part in the question paper... The reason is that the students will mostly use languages other than C for their day-to-day work in the industry...

I may be wrong but this is my observation vis-a-vis the current IT scene of India...