Recently, I came across a post on LinkedIn where a young programmer (about my age) claimed that they didn’t want to work for a company where older obsolete programmers were let go instead of being retained for their expertise. His defense being, “He would be there someday too”.
This individual definitely meant well but his thoughts managed to irk me to no end. The biggest issue I have with that post is it’s your duty as a programmer to keep yourself informed and up to date, not that of some employer. Just because a programmer is older does not imply that they are outdated and just because someone is young does not imply that they are up to date either.
I’ve been a programmer for quite some time now and I’ve strove to keep myself ahead of the tech steamroller. I know a lot of people my age who got a MS in Computer Science but never learned anything new after Grad School and eventually became obsolete. Once I started as a programmer, I found that I needed to know what was going outside of my job. I had this sheer desire to learn and try all sorts of programming on a continuous loop. Needless to say, I quickly became addicted to this whole process.
By my second year, I saw that Distributed Computing and Parallel Systems were going to be the future, and I wiggled my way into the group that worked with them. Once I was there, I read about a new language called and convinced myself that it was worth learning. Turned out that knowing Rust meant that my first system-level application could be written in Rust instead of C++.
Later, I discovered and it clicked again. I added some hacky objects to Javascript so that I could take advantage. Eventually, when Deno appeared I was ready to add it to my ammo as well.
After my sojourn at , I figured out the need to work on Devops and Testing. I spent my summer working for Wikimedia Foundation as a developer where I evaluated different end-to-end testing solutions written in Javascript. Once appeared, I convinced , my GSoC mentor, to consider evaluating Playwright as an automated testing framework.
That’s what happens when you pay attention to what’s going on in the industry instead of just focussing on what you’re doing.
You never know what might become the next big thing but you can always make yourself aware of everything, even if you can’t actually try everything
I remember a fellow intern in Falkonry from IIT-B, a “Java” lead, to whom I suggested that he tried when he had some issue with Kubernetes. He looked at me like I was nuts; he didn’t know that there was a language called “Go”. Even then, he didn’t even have any interest in trying it because it didn’t affect his job. I fail to comprehend this kind of an attitude. You never know where the next big thing might come from. Refusing to even admit that the world is changing is not going to keep it from doing that.
My friends, who got the MS degree, and eventually lost their jobs when the Spring Boot based micro-services were retired, complained about how they should have taken the time to learn something else. They could no longer work as programmers. Once you discover that you are obsolete, it’s too late. Expecting your employer to retrain you is a fool’s pipe dream.
It’s up to you to keep up. It’s up to you to keep trying new things even if they might not be important. Learning anything is useful. The more programming technologies and tools you try to play with, the easier it will be for you to learn what comes next. But learning is never useless on its own. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing open source projects, volunteering to code something, or even just working on personal projects that nobody will ever see. It’s training your brain to take on new things. Even knowing what’s going on in the programming world is going to help, as you never know what a future employer might be asking for.
Don’t procrastinate today. Learn something new. Better learn something new. Keep your eyes open. You might see the future coming to you. It’s not a big deal when it shows up. I’ve been lucky enough to keep my eyes peeled, and it’s kept me programming with success and still working on modern things.