What Skills Would You Like To Acquire? 1

[BJCooperIT]

In thread656-1196884 you were asked "Where Are You Now?". What I would like to know is a bit more hypothetical. What skills would you like to acquire? I know answers will vary based on your role in the industry, but perhaps responses posted here will help give direction to those who are a bit lost. Sometimes we all flounder a bit after being entrenched in our jobs. You may be so busy that you do not recognize the proverbial "handwriting on the wall" that signals the end of an era.

Did I recognize the end of COBOL as a marketable skill in my area in the 80's? No. I was so busy coding that I was unaware of where the industry was headed.

When I was buried in OS2 and Windows 3.1 did I even look up from my monitor to say "What next"? No, because four teenagers and 50 hour work weeks left me too exhausted.

For many years now, my specialty has been custom Oracle forms. In my part of the country, the demand is more for developers who can code forms and reports to help maintain Oracle's applications. Since the clients that I have, develop their own applications, there is a declining need for custom developers. In the next two years I would like to:
1. Gain exposure to Oracle Applications
2. Learn JAVA and C++
3. Learn more about Oracle Application Servers

So, look around and ask yourself? Where do I want to go from here and what will it take to get there?

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Consultant Developer/Analyst Oracle, Forms, Reports & PL/SQL (Windows)
My website: Emu Products Plus

 

[SF0751]

My job is telcom, and I know traditional TDM very well. I also work with the normal business adjuncts - Call Center programming and call routing, announcment programming and recording, voicemail, call recording, call tracking, IVR's, etc. However, Voice over IP (VoIP) is now becoming a bigger player, and a lot of companies (mine included) use at least some VoIP phones/technology).

My next education stop is to learn the IP/network side of things - IP setup and addressing, routers, firewalls, etc. Although we have an excellant network team here, if I need something for my VoIP sites, I need to be able to talk with these guys. In order to do that, I need the understand the language and how things operate. Since Cisco is the big IP player in our shop, I'm currently taking IP Networking and Cicso classes. It's like learning a foreign language.

Susan
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work."
- Thomas A. Edison

 

[jmd0252]

The IBM Midrange, System 36, AS400, seemd the way to go 20 years ago,, but RPG green screen coding, looks to be heading slowly south. VB and .NET, and SQL, ever try to talk about creating a PF, or LF to a SQL programmer,, where it is tables, and rows, and columns. Translation sometimes is the toughest part.

 

[chiph]

Just picked up a Ruby book, and hope to get familiar with Rails.

http://www.rubyonrails.org

Watch the videos - they create a weblog from scratch in 15 minutes.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
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[carp]

Still working on changing lead into gold. Will keep you posted.

 

[Glenn9999]

snap my fingers and have a job in the space of a week?

 

[Zelandakh]

I'd like to be certified Cisco engineer and am looking to upgrade my MCSE to latest version. But I really need to be able to get my staff to do their jobs and stop users from treating me badly. Man management skills and diplomacy are just as important as technical skills...

 

[gbaughma]

For me, every day is an opportunity to learn.

I would like to...
o Finish and live the "7 habits of highly effective people"
o Get certified in MCSE and Cisco
o Perhaps go back to school and get my degree, if I can first manage to stretch time so a day is 27 hours....
o (as said in the other post) write a piece of software that competes with Microsoft to the point that they pay me $10M for my product.
o Come up with the "ultimate piece of software" that nobody can live without. <Shrug>



Just my 2¢

"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg

 

[jrbarnett]

Having changed my job at the start of this year, specialising in one of my core areas, my own skills I would like to acquire are as follows:
1. Learn the major software product I'm responsible for in depth (at present I am alright provided it doesn't go beyond the help files or common sense plus my existing knowledge, and their helpdesk leaves a lot to be desired sometimes).
2. Understand Novell products a lot better (Netware, Zenworks and Groupwise plus related tools). This may sound odd as Novell products seem to be a dying breed, but my employer uses it in a big way and Microsoft based servers are in the minority.
I have to be able to talk to the Novell experts in language that they can understand.
3. Complete my MCSE (one exam to go), although its not really relevant to my current job.
4. Look at .NET in some form or other. There's the possibility of a rewrite of an existing system soon so this will become a contender for that.

They are the main points I've got. There are some others but they are lower down my priority list.

John

 

[lionelhill]

<gloom extreme>
Perhaps someone can help; I'm going through a phase where I'm having difficulties motivating myself to learn.

For years I did odd bits of data-handling software in Pascal; it's always been a beloved tool of the scientist whose primary role isn't programming, but who nevertheless needs an easy, flexible and fast language for data processing. If only it had variable-length arrays.

Now I'm getting into .NET C++, and I'm catching myself really resenting some of the learning-curve.

For example the use of properties to hide variables is fine, but when the property name and the variable name differ only in the case of the first letter (which seems to be common practice?) I find my head just isn't case-sensitive enough to use the two correctly in the methods of the base class (which, of course, can access directly or via properties). This is particularly horrible because the code compiles OK, and runs OK, but just isn't what I intended. I prefer errors that don't work, or better still, don't compile.

Another range of examples are things like "#pragma once". OK, I can remember to put it in all my headers. But since you practically never need to read a header more than once, why not make that the default? And why pick a word like "#pragma" that has no meaning in common english?

And I can type fairly well. So why abbreviate everything to the point of illegibility (e.g. the "?" operator in C)? You only have to pad it out again with comments to explain what the code does. But this is a typical C-versus-basic-or-pascal whine...

But the worst thing is all the background activity that must be necessary to support "managed code". Coming from a procedural background it's terrifying to think of all the calls necessary to handle even quite simple manipulations of simple objects. It's no wonder processors need to be fast nowadays.

There's just no satisfaction for me in programming when I no longer have any idea what sort of code the compiler is producing, or what the processor is actually doing. The hard disk trundles away to itself for a bit, and "hello world!" pops out like it always did. But it takes longer than it used to, and I don't know how it's doing it any more.

Perhaps I'm just too old for IT-related activities.
</gloom>

 

[jmanj]

Since I'm retiring this year, I'm thinking of buying an RV and America here I come!! Seriously, If I still have enough energy I would like to pursue something I have began calculating many many years ago. I can have my son help me(he is also an EE and computer engr) in findings ways to store information into a medium which uses light (7 spectrum) like a prism. Since the advent of nanotechnology, everything seems quite possible. I like to try programming in the molecular level and use the spectrum to warehouse the information. Can you imagine the power of many mainframes right into everyday wrist watch? This may sound far-fetched but remember light is energy and energy is a molecule that can be manipulated. Fiber optics was just the beginning.

 

[jsteph]

What Skills Would You Like To Acquire?

How to stop my wife from buying unecessary stuff.

If I knew that I could pour slurpees for a living and be comfortable and wouldn't need new IT skills.
--Jim

 

[langleymass]

Stop giving your wife money.

 

[jsteph]

Oh, if only it were that easy...

 

[ecobb]

I remember reading a quote one time...

A man will pay $2 for a $1 item that he needs immediately, and a woman will pay $1 for a $2 sale item that she has absolutely no use for.

While it may not be true in all cases, it's still good for a chuckle...


Hope This Helps!

ECAR
ECAR Technologies

http://www.ecartech.com

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher

 

[Sympology]

ECAR, trust me it's true.

My darling other half spent £15 on a pair of shoes that didn't fit. Reason, they were 1/2 price...what a bargain !

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[Skittle]

jmd0252 - I know what you mean.

I've worked on AS400's for 15 odd years.
A few years ago I started looking into the Microsoft way when RPG jobs dropped out of the top 100 advertised skills ( accoriding to Computer Weekly ).

I've dabled with VB.NET but prefer working with SQL Server.
Trouble is - 5 minutes after getting up to speed with them - the new versions have come out ( sigh ).
This is a problem I never seemed to have with As400's.


Dazed and confused

 

[gbaughma]

I want an AS/400. Almost got my hands on one....

I "dabble" with the AS/400. It was a trial by fire. This bank that I consult for went from a System 38 to an AS/400, and called me up and said "Our new mainframe is here. We need it set up, running, on the network, the clients installed on the PCs, and able to print before the banking software company gets here to convert our data."

It's a great machine, tho.


Just my 2¢

"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg

 

[jsteph]

I've said before in other threads and I'll say it again--the AS/400 is solid as a rock. I developed a couple of major client/server systems using the as/400. With myself and other develpers running everything from horrible code to cutting-edge code, that thing never fell.

But IBM once again let it's arrogance and stodgyness lose the market by not pricing more competitively.

The 400's were, on average, triple the cost of a Windows server of comparable performance. We'd bid the windows box at $10,000, and the little 400's were about $30,000.

Now, these weren't 100% mission-critical apps, but they were no doublt very critical, but the customer always would say, "to save $20,000, I'll suffer a few abends"--which in reality, most of these windows boxes, when used strictly as a sql-server box, had very impressive uptime performance.

Going further off tangent, we have an IBM P90 at my current site, costing nearly 1 Mil. It's gone down 7 times in the last 2 years. And every time our Aix apologist guy says, "well, it was the air-conditioning system that time" or, "it was the HCMP that other time" or a memory chip failure, gigabit card, whatever.

I don't care--it's a system--the whole weakest link in chain concept. We used 100% approved peripherals. If part of the system goes down making the mainframe shut down or become unavailable--the system is down. PERIOD.

During that 2 year period, our $18,000 hp/compaq 560 running 27 sql server databases *never, ever* went down unplanned.
--Jim

 

[kHz]

Never heard of a P90. Must be a pSeries 690. I have worked on them and never had any problems like you say. And HACMP wouldn't cause it to fail; that's software for clustering for when a server does fail it will failover to a secondary server. In over 3 years with HACMP it never caused a server failure. Not anymore than Veritas Cluster Server will cause a server to fail. And a NIC card causing a server failure?

Also, the workload and reasons for a p690 are different than an intel/sql server machine.

Sounds like its all an exaggeration.