Gartner's top ten IT trends predicts the "death of a programmer" within the next eight to ten years. With tools doing more than 75 percent of coding in the not so distant future, the role of a programmer will be marginalised within the next decade. To survive and thrive in a highly competitive ever-changing environment, it will become imperative for programmers to acquire other skills and channelise into additional streams. For the lakhs of hopefuls who want to enter the IT industry within the next five to ten years, this would mean a more focused career approach and consequently a much greater challenge than what is being faced by new entrants into the industry presently.
Partha Iyengar, vice president and research director at Gartner Research, considers the "death of a programmer" a too dramatic term. "De-emphasising the role of a programmer would be the right terminology," he says, adding that looking back at the history of programming languages…1GL/2GL/3GL/4GL-there has been increasing capabilities of software tools and decreasing capabilities of programmers.
The perspective of looking at a software developer as a coder is going to witness a sea change. "They have to look at career upgrade to become solution architects, quality testers, understand business domain and branch out," says Satyen Parikh, Borland-India's managing director. The tools should be viewed not as replacements for programmers but the via media for increasing their productivity. Parikh points out that a developer plays an important part in the team and this is where he should be more effective: "In engineering, everything is team work. Software development discipline is difficult to work in-there is resource shortage, projects are behind deadline, the customer is never happy and the team keeps changing, how a developer plays his role in all this will be the key to his career success."
Impact on the industry
The Indian IT industry is increasingly seeing more business skills being demanded from service providers by their clients. "This will decrease the value proposition of the army of Java programmers to smaller numbers and business-savvy tech professionals will be in demand. Clients in the US and UK demand technical professionals speaking the language of business," states Iyengar, insisting that organisations have to soon start focusing on business skills.
Dilip Thomas Ittyera, CTO of Zensar Technologies believes that the key is to turn code sweatshops into specialised designing hubs: "In the near future we need engineers as designers, architects, etc, instead of programmers, as in coders. The truth is that when most software engineers come fresh out of school, like other engineers they are ready to start a career in engineering, but we turn them into coders. If this does not change soon, we will lose the position of advantage that we enjoy around the globe." The change will evidently lead to a change in business models-from arbitrage on the conversion factor between the US dollar and the Indian rupee to value-added design capabilities, which are higher up in the value chain. Ittyera foresees design collaborations between global teams, which will include generation and assembly units that will convert these designs to executable applications and test them.
The fact that the IT industry in India also needs to move from back-end work to front-end operations cannot be overlooked. Says Iyengar, "For this they need the human resources and skills. Companies show better capabilities at front-end will be successful. Those that will not will remain at the sub-contracting level."
Job market
The recruiter will no longer ask "how many years of programming" or "how many lines of code", but would want to know if the code has made a difference to the product. The attitude, approach and whole mindset will be the focal factors, feels Parikh.
Employers will not look for technical skills but also a combination of business skills. Iyengar perdicts a boarder base for hiring-not just technical professionals and MBAs, but from Commerce as well as Arts backgrounds. He adds: "It is well known that pure techies are not always comfortable with clients. They are not people's people and consequently there are often complaints. So IT organisations in India will need employees who have people as well as business skills and a thin level of technology." The hiring pattern will evidently change dramatically. Apart from an increasing focus on MBA, programmers will move away from service orientation to programming jobs in product companies, which might lead to high level of innovation. Hiring of programmers will be done by product companies for R&D.
Re-skilling
While IT organisations will continue to need some level of programming talent (maybe one-fifth of the present demand), programmers would have to look at reskilling themselves. With changing times, they would need to have a very open mindset, a strong adaptation to change and keenness to adopt and learn technology. "It would be appropriate for engineers to be aware of business administration, finance, marketing, HR-and extended knowledge of business domain," says Parikh.
Ittyera points out that as market needs will move to engineers with design capability from current coding capability, there will initially be a shortage of supply and organisations will be forced to transform their workforce to meet this short supply. They have to go back to the basics, apply design skills and learn different architectures.
Advice to students
For millions of students who dream of successful career opportunities in the IT industry, the right qualification will not be sufficient. "My advice to students is-focus on the fundamentals of software engineering rather than on specific programming skills. That never gets obsolete," says Ganesh Natarajan, deputy chairman and CEO of Zensar.
Ittyera adds, "Students should get more hands-on on design projects than those that focus on writing some useless VB application as part of their course requirement."
It is also necessary for students to be well-informed of the changing the industry dynamics. Parikh emphasises that they should get acclimatised to follow industry intricacies, meet the people, have practical round of views so that when they enter the industry they are not naivetes.
The key is to avoid the herd mentality and be more aware. "They have to look at opportunities. Skills will be more dynamic. Companies will move from title-based resources to role-based resources. It will be a challenging time for students to match their interest with their career path, which won't be as clear-cut," concedes Iyengar.
The good news is broader academic hiring by IT companies in the future. Says Iyengar, "Today if you are not an engineer, you can say goodbye to a career in IT. This will be possible in the future, though finding the right slot will be a challenge."
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