Quick Thought — The pressure on new people entering Tech
Over several years of my working life, I have been having this thought in my mind. Some days, it was more present than others. Very few days where it did not popup(most likely due to being either sick or hangover). The thought is: What do I need to do to keep up?
Let me offer you my background, quickly: I am a Robotics Engineer by training. I need to know several programming languages, frameworks, mathematics, standards, software engineering practices and a whole lot of other things to perform minimally on what I do. Currently, I am a Technical Lead. My job consists that I need to be in the forefront of Technology, leading and develop new ideas into useful products, in the AI and IoT area.
Note: There is a very big component of dealing with people: Other developers, departments, managers. But I am leaving that aside, for now.
If you work in Tech, you already know that, if you distract yourself long enough, the tech you know may be deprecated. Some areas like AI and Web development(I could give more examples, but I am sure these 2 are good enough by themselves), are so incredibly volatile, you need to keep up with it, every day, and, you need to pick a subset or two, since, it is simply not possible to be proficient at every single detail of the area.
The pressure to just be in game is high. I am not even going to talk about being in the forefront of all. You absolutely need to dedicate focused time on the area you want to be on. It is not for the faint of heart. If you want to be good, you need to handle the stress that it comes with such rapid changes.
With this line of thought, a very important question arose. This especially concerns me, since dealing with hiring new developers/engineers is part of my job:
Taking into account all the changes and evolution that we are seeing in Tech, how the new developers are going to be able to adapt to this?
Every single day, the technological stacks increases, more tools are developed, changed, deprecated, refactored; more programming languages are created or their standards change, the current area adapt their subsets or create new ones. I could go on and on.
We need to rethink how to actually teach new tech people on how to adapt to the work they are getting themselves into!
We all need to make effort to adapt the Tech education system, and, in my opinion, resuscitate, greatly and quickly, mentor-ship relation between senior and junior developers(I will expand mentor-ship in another article). If we do not do something, even small steps, the juniors will just be lost. Over time, the juniors will be the new seniors. Mixing inexperience with enough time and more systems developed by inexperience, will equal to bad consequences that we do not want to deal with.
I already have some ideas on this, but I will leave this to some other time! I just want to call some attention to an arising problem that is surfacing, slowly at first, but, as in everything in Tech, it will grow at an exponential rate…
