Skills of an Estonian IT professional: Evolution

Every year requirements of an IT specialist rise. Competition is getting more intense and more and more people try to become IT specialists. The IT world is very different to what it was 20 years ago.

Stack Overflow became a thing. Nowadays, programmer must be an expert at using Google search. Almost every problem's solution and every question's answer can be found on the Internet, specifically on Stack Overflow.

Security is something we have to think about now. 20 years ago IT specialists didn't have many concerns on program security, nowadays, cybersecurity has become a major branch of development, many cybersecurity companies have risen and cybersecurity has become a big concern in modern society.

The set of tools for working with the language is much wider. Previously, there was only a compiler and, if you're lucky, a debugger. Today they usually come with a linter, a code formatter, a templating engine, a self-updating feature, and a list of reasons to use in holivars against competing languages. It really changes the way the developer works and the toolset that a programmer must know has become a lot bigger.

We open source everything by default except the code that would really embarass us. Nowadays, everyone uploads their projects to GitHub and make it open-source. This way developers can show their projects when seeking for a job.

Working as a programmer remotely is easier than ever thanks to the new technologies like video conferencing and ubiquitous internet. The Pandemic has accelerated this shift rapidly. Many developers prefer to work from home(or even from some tropical resort!). In some ways it is a positive change, in others I would say it has impacted our society rather negatively. This trend can slow down a growth of a young developer, since he can't ask and speak directly to senior developer so easily.

Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago. It really shows how requirements for IT developer have changed. Nowadays, a developer must learn many tools, libraries and languages, whereas in the earlier days developer had to master one thing and be good at it.

And also you shouldn't forget that the target audience of becoming IT developer has changed drastically, IT developers are no longer seen as unsocial, weird and boring people stuck all day behind a computer.



References:

https://ssg.dev/how-is-computer-programming-different-today-than-20-years-ago-9d0154d1b6ce


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