Subj : Re: What things should successful programmers-to-be learn right now? To : comp.programming From : mschaef Date : Wed Jul 27 2005 01:13 pm In article , Rick D. wrote: >Hi all, > >What are the most important things successful programmers-to-be should >learn right now, to have a shot at a great career ? Economics and a Business domain (or two) >... C#, the .NET api, ... visual studio ... C++ ... JAVA ... VB ? .... frameworks ... api's ... design methods These skills are getting to the point where they won't support the 1st world, middle class lifestyle you probably want. There are possible exceptions, the defense industry being one, but even jobs in that sector will face increased competion from other local developers whose jobs got offshored and are now looking for places to put their coding skills to work. If you want to stay close to software and still justify your salary, you'll need to understand enough of a particular set of business problems that you can sell yourself as a busineess analyst. The ability to analyze a business process, design an improvement possibly involving some software, and negotiate all of the stakeholders to a consensus is going to be far more useful to you than any programming language you could ever learn. This goes double if you want to start your own software company: you'll need the technical skills, but the skills that will really pay the rent are marketing, product design, management, etc. A few months ago, I asked a manger who was trying to hire me into a software position what he thought about offshoring. He told me a story of a competitor who switched to a foreign supplier of printed circuit boards: the defect rate went from 20% to 0.1% and cost dropped 90%. I didn't take the job. When you're competing with folks that work for a tenth as much, it doesn't matter how good you are individually, the foreign development shop will be able to put in more controls, more review, more testing, more proces, and produce a better product for less money. -Mike -- http://www.mschaef.com .