The Top 10 Dying Computer Skills

May 29th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

I just read a great article on Computerworld about dying computer skills. The article covers how it’s becoming harder and harder to recruit individuals with ‘old school’ computer skills like Novell NetWare, OS/2 and Cobol.

The article reminded me of a conversation I had with my older brother a few months ago. My brother and I were debating what would happen when this generation starts to disappear, as today’s generation tend to use apps to do their development, rather than developing their own apps.
Although my brother now works in finance, he’s part of probably the last generation that were taught how to program computers in machine code. By the time I got around to studying for my Computer Studies GCSE, computer programming had been dropped from the sylabbus. I started computing studies A-level, but I swapped to chemistry after a month once I saw the exam results for my sixth-form college as the previous year nobody got A grades, and I needed As to get onto my uni course.

When Y2K was coming up, I remember that a lot of computer engineers came out of retirement because their skills were in high demand again. Do you think we will be faced with similar situations in the future?

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 6 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Comment by John on 29 May 2007:

    No, there’s still plenty of people with low level programming skills (there might even be more) as there’s more and more embedded computing (mobile phones, digital TV, washing machies, routers etc) and an increase in the number of hardware platforms that need OS’s and drivers porting to.

  2. #2

    Comment by Everton on 29 May 2007:

    are you a programmer John?

  3. #3

    Comment by listikal on 29 May 2007:

    My college years (98-2000) were mostly Novell Netware with some Windows NT/2000. Novell is unfortunately on it’s way completely out the door, although a lot of American college and universities still run it.

  4. #4

    Comment by Ibrahim on 30 May 2007:

    Well, as the object-oriented programming took place several years ago it`s obvious that low-level programming languages were going no where other than history!
    And now with the new user friendly applications (VB for e.g.) most of these languages will be just unnecessary.
    Anyway, no one can deny that these languages were the first stone in the modern programming revolution.

    Do you think we will be faced with similar situations in the future?

    Maybe, but not like the “old-school” situation as the current programming revolution is almost at the peak.
    Maybe the development of CPUs/Memories will lead us to a new programming and hardware simulation concepts!

  5. #5

    Trackback by MathPoints on 30 May 2007:

    Tuesday Tech Buzz - May 29th, 2007…

    Top 10 Dying Computer Skills: To be honest, I have only heard of two of them……

  6. #6

    Comment by Budi S on 30 May 2007:

    In my country
    - Low level Programming
    - Cobol
    is still very needed ….
    So i think, it depends on the location …
    because new technology is still expensive …

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