Programmer Career Development: Always be Learning

I am sure this comes as no surprise to most programmers but here is how career development works in the field of programming, as I know it. The short story is, if you are not developing yourself then you are putting yourself at risk if the axe comes, the next job will be harder to find and you will be several steps behind when you have to retrain.

Image from HockeyTweet, the
1st iPhone App I wrote to teach
myself iOS programming.

I spoke to a fellow programmer recently who got cut from his full-time job and started contracting. He does not contract out of choice but out of a need to earn for his family. He was in one field for many years with a large company, they retooled their business to eliminate an obsolete product and his skills were no longer needed. His skill set was obsolete.

He related that when you get older people do not want to hire you as much. But when I listen to his story I hear someone that did not keep up with the changes in technology and the programming skills required to be current for today's jobs. He was blaming age for what was really a skill set issue.

I completely disagree that age is the issue. I think skill set and engagement in your field of choice is the issue.

If you are engaged in your field, are taking time to train yourself in the new technology/languages/processes, then your past experience is an asset to add to your "current" skills. Your past is not a detriment, it's a wealth of experience. Let's admit it, the hot languages change, the platforms change, but the skills to be a good programmer do not. We are still reading and learning Computer Science theory that was written long before we were born or started in the field. Data structures, algorithms, and optimization have not gone away; they are just dressed up in a new set of robes.

This week I have been catching up on the material from WWDC 2014 and getting my feet wet with Swift. For me, I am excited about the improvements Apple has made. 

On the flip side, I have hear/read some Apple programmers bemoan the fact they need to learn so much new stuff. I think these are the people that came into iOS programming since that is the current hotness and they needed a job. They didn't start iOS programming because the loved the platform.

I feel bad for those people that feel it is a chore to learn this. I know myself, that it is hard to chisel out the time to get current on the new APIs, language, and more but this is our job. Companies don't give you a week off to train. If you want to stay current, you figure it out.

Put me in the camp of those that love iOS. I started programming with it from day one of the SDK being available. It has been a blast and one of the most fun platforms I have programmed for. I thought a Vic-20 was awesome as a 7 year old, so I can not imagine what I would have thought of programming an iPhone at that age.

I can't get over how much I am loving Swift. The videos are such a great introduction and I can see that the hardest thing will be getting our minds wrapped around the new syntax. Being able to do so much in one line will be powerful but also take some concentration to reread. I love the power of the syntax but am reminded of my days writing a lot of Perl. I remember writing similarly super-powered single line statements that turned out were hard to debug or read a day or week later. I have higher hopes for Swift since it does not get into the crazy number of special operators that Perl had.

For me, the advances Apple has made this year are not a burden I must bear. They are a reduction in some of the boilerplate we had to write, they are a simpler way of doing things, and they are a view into the future of programming on Apple devices.