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?
