cobol, perl, java, C++ Job Trends

cobol jobs – perl jobs – java jobs – C++ jobs

So far, there’s still a solid market for COBOL, Perl, and C++ jobs: I’m not sure you get much “longer term” in the programming word. Growth is certainly dropping off, but if you went into the market learning COBOL, you’re pushing firmly into retirement age at this point.

The problem is that while the industry may be evolving, many companies aren’t. And companies want interoperable parts. They don’t want to pay someone who is going to have to come in and learn how to operate Eclipse or Visual Studio or Hibernate/NHibernate or whatever. They want someone who can hit the ground running with the technologies they are using now.

To this extent, someone who knows many languages somewhat is providing a much poorer service than someone who knows one language and its tools well — think about the level of expertise required to masterfully handle Seam or Rails. You could (and many people do) spend full-time chasing after the “bleeding edge” of Ruby/Rails or Groovy/Grails, and for clients using those technologies, that is a very important skill.

The role of a polyglot is limited to experimental teams, either in start-ups or in experimental (and often politically risky) projects within larger corporations. From a project manager’s/business owner’s standpoint, a new technology is only justifiable if it gains a value greater than the cost of retraining the team and taking the initial productivity hit — and usually that’s measured between now and the 1.0 release, because most projects don’t get past that point. In that kind of limited scope, it’s very hard to justify a new technology as relevant or valuable.

And that’s how new technologies get added onto the “to try out” list, and never get off.

Software engineers make their living providing a service. If the service you provide is poor then you can be replaced easily. If the service is high quality then you cannot. Waiters at restaurants are the same way. It is not easy to find a waiter for high end restaurants because most wait staff will not provide your customers with the same level of quality as you expect. In the same way, high end engineers are hard to find because most engineers produce work that is vastly inferior to that of the high end.

As for the single-technology-stack developers… I see two distinct questions with two distinct answers:

1) Will there always be jobs for these people? Yes. Absolutely.
2) Will there be a future for these people? No. Absolutely not.

When the industry stops and quits evolving is the day that investing in a single technology stack will pay dividends. In the meantime, for most it is a single investment that will pay diminishing returns in the long term.