I have worked in the IT industry for many years and continue to be impressed how rapidly this industry is changing and how difficult it is to keep up with changes and continue to practice our skills.
My father was a shoemaker and so was his father before him. Most of their work was spent on repairing outworn leather shoes with primitive tools, not designing or building them. The work was lonely and time-consuming, but it allowed them to be independent craftsmen and business operators.
Mind you, when they first started in their trade, they were taught all the necessary skills, including making new shoes. But in practice, each discovered, in their own time, that selling new shoes and making them were different skill sets, and their strength was in making, rather than selling. Thus, their livelihood became dependent on repairing shoes.
My career in IT has followed a similar path. I learned my technical skills to design and build software solutions in school, and I sharpened my skills in the workforce. In those early years, every large corporation maintained and funded their own internal staff of programmers and business analysts who developed software for internal use and provided opportunities for their employers to be ahead of their competition. The IT job market was hot and you were always guaranteed of a job.
Then a change swept through IT. Business solutions providers such as IBM and SAP, saw that there were many internal application that were very similar in their design and programming, especially in vertical markets such as insurance, banking, manufacturing, etc. Internally developed systems became dinosaurs within the IT industry, and off the shelf solutions from these providers became the new norm. Companies no longer sought programmers and business analysts for developing internal solutions; instead they sent their RFP's (Request for Proposal) to these solutions providers and selected the solution that met their requirements. If there were any internal staff remaining, they would not develop any new solutions, but become trained in the vendor's solution to act as technical liaisons between their employer and the vendor. Programming was no longer a hot skill, demand for programmers dropped, and job titles such as "systems analyst" and "programmer/analyst" disappeared.
It was during this period of change that I opted to leave the security of employment and become an independent contractor; and why not? My "per diem" compensation increased, along with contracts in a variety of industries and technologies. I didn't make the jump with my eyes closed. I worked for a consulting firm for a couple of years, learned the business model, and decided to try it on my own. I became a valued member in projects which required all the skills I enjoyed: programming, business analysis, project planning/management. Each contract had a different emphasis on these skills and the variety of contracts ensured that I could practice and be current with my skills set.
After 20 years of contract work, I began to experience a slowdown in opportunities, a downgrade in billable rates, and a shallowness in the quality of opportunities. In the early years, I would have agents and companies calling me for contract work; now I had to call them and could no longer expect the contract rates that I had experienced in the past. Something had changed, but it was not clear to me, exactly what, until I discovered that the work was being outsourced abroad, to India, Romania, Russia, anywhere the labour costs were significantly lower than in Canada.
Time for another change. Rather than looking to develop new systems, I focused on integrating systems with each other; in other words, cobbling them together. Hence the title of this blog.
A story about adapting to change which you may find interesting!
No comments:
Post a Comment