As software professionals, how has the rise of the IOT (Internet of Things) impacted us most? As I am observing the phenomena I think the biggest impact is to our commitment to learning.
Think about it. A smart watch you can purchase today has more power than a mid-range computer in the early ‘80s. If I remember correctly, an IBM System 32 had a 3 line screen with 40 characters per line. That’s almost as long as a Tweet! Moore’s law continues to make things faster, more powerful, smaller, and cheaper. As the internet gets faster, and the cost continues to drop, connecting all of these devices has made a virtual giant that needs no sleep, with a capacity difficult to imagine.
What do we have that the IOT cannot replace, at least in the near future? We have the ability to reason. We have the ability to dream. We can take a vague concept and turn it into an idea. We may not be able to compete with IBM Watson when filtering through a massive database of trivia to answer questions in Jeopardy. But we can find correlations in information from very different disciplines in ways a computer has yet to achieve without being told how to do it.
If you haven’t picked up on my theme here, I think the competition for future employment is not going to be globalization; it’s not going to be people from other countries willing to work for a lower wage. Our competition is going to be with machines capable of doing jobs that are more and more complex. So what are the jobs that will be available to us in the future? In reality, we don’t know.
What we do know is this. The job you are doing today has the potential to be automated. I recently heard an advertisement selling franchises for a robot that serves frozen yogurt. In the old days, the job would have been to have a person serving the yogurt. Today the job is to support a robot that does all the work. If your job can be automated, you are going to have to learn new skills to be employable.
This principle is impacting us today. As software professionals we are going to need to be just as dedicated to learning as we are to doing our job. The days of learning a framework and riding that train for a decade are pretty much gone. For me, the perfect employer is the one that recognizes their investment in you as a resource, and is willing to provide tools for you to constantly be learning new things and applying it to your daily tasks.
Cheers,
Ben