10 dying IT skills (No matter how good you are with these skills, you won't get a job today)

Tech Republic ^ | June 28,2009 | Linda Leung

[presently no screen name]

mark

[Lurker]

30 years ago I was running a state of the art business computer system. It was the size of my refrigerator. The drives were separate with 6 megs of storage. The disks were the size of LP's and there were 6 of them in one array IRC.

It had a blazing fast 9800 baud acoustic modem.

Now my cell phone has more computing power. If you spend the time to keep yourself current, you'll be alright.

[SeekAndFind]

C will never be obsolete. It will always come up during interviews!

I think just knowing C will get you nowhere today. Everyone is looking for Object Oriented skills, which means wither C++ or Java or C# ( I call them the big 3 ).

[SpaceBar]

Job Control Language is a little before my day but I never heard anything good about it from those who had to use it.

[Poser]

Dbase/Foxpro anyone?
Arcnet?

g=c800:5

[kalee]

ping

[Nervous Tick]

IMO, this is a problem many job seekers in many fields have.

Rather than being good at achieving *results* (using whatever tools are *suitable for the job*), they are “specialists” in one technology or another.

Surest way to a career dead end that I know.

“I can use an electric drill really well, man! I know all the best kinds of bits to buy, and I used to write articles for ‘Boring World’, an electric drill journal!”

“Nails? What are those? Glue? No man, you want to drill a hole! Glue isn’t good!”

“Did I tell you about the time I built a house using only a drill? It was pretty cool... until it fell down. Hire me and my drill skillz and you can’t go wrong!”

[CaptRon]

HTML is the grandchild of GML which I used in conjunction with COBOL to produce every document that was issued by an insurance company worked for many years ago.

[Clock King]

I always thought COBOL was a good skill to have for “in-between jobs” jobs. Banks or financial institutions always had legacy code that either needed updating or conversion. It rare knowledge so you could charge a pretty penny. But you can’t make a career out it. And at this point (end of the first decade of 21st century), I would suspect almost all of the old databases should have been converted into something more modern.

[When do we get liberated?]

Love this post. 10 skills I never had and are irrelevent!

[Domandred]

10: COBOL

There are STILL a lot of COBOL systems out there. One of my jobs though is to convert old COBOL code to something more modern. So every time I go out on a contract another COBOL system dies.

[SpaceBar]

Agreed. There seems to be a popular emphasis on a “magic bullet” language that will guarantee permanent job security, instead of a thorough knowledge of algorithms and data structures, with an ability to pick up new programming paradigms as they come along.

[freeandfreezing]

11) Zilog Z80 assembler.

You mean the Mostek Z80 cross assembler they wrote in FORTRAN?

Nothing like writing assembler code on an 029 keypunch...

[domeika]

MCPD = me

[COBOL2Java]

Job Control Language is a little before my day but I never heard anything good about it from those who had to use it.

Nah, if you knew what you were doing, JCL was fun! Especially checkpoint / restart on tapes! And who could forget PROC overrides! :-)

[Nervous Tick]

>> One of my jobs though is to convert old COBOL code to something more modern. So every time I go out on a contract another COBOL system dies.

I hope they’re paying you well.

[Domandred]

Banks or financial institutions always had legacy code that either needed updating or conversion. It rare knowledge so you could charge a pretty penny. But you can’t make a career out it.

Been making a career out of it for 6 years now actually, but it is going away fairly rapidly.

[proxy_user]

“Tubes live!”

Yeah, but in my phono preamp, not my computer.

[CaptRon]

Me too.

[Revolting cat!]

Ms Leung is shooting ducks in a barrel and missing, too! I wouldn’t hire her with these skills.