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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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