Keeping Up With Technical Change

By Bruce Taylor

For you engineers out there -

I can tell you your worst nightmare: you go to bed one night as a competent secure in your technical competence, and you wake up the next morning as a technological dinosaur. All your strong technologies are now quaint footnotes in the history books and you're faced with re-learning a whole new repertoire of technologies. You open up the morning paper and you see a want ad like this:

Job Description:

As a member of a project team responsible for designing, coding, unit/integration testing web services applications using Java, XML, or SQL. Understanding of system development lifecycle processes and rapid development cycles with the ability to independently code, test and implement solutions based on user requirements and as directed by project leadership. Ability to plan, manage and lead UML design sessions. Exceptional user facing skills and client relationship skills.

Required Experience/Technologies:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or other physical science
7+ years of professional Java development experience with at least 3 years J2EE
J2EE, XML, SQL, hands-on database development (JDBC)

Jakarta Struts (Front Controller with JSP's) or EJB2.0
At least two of the following technologies: SOAP, SAX/DOM, JMS,
XML Schema or DTD, Stateless Session Beans
5 years UML design modeling experience
mandatory, RUP, UML
WebSphere certification preferred



How in the world did this happen - how did you fall so far behind do quickly? Well, don't feel too bad, the technology changes so quickly that you're running the Red Queen's race: you have to run as hard as you can to stay in the same place, and to make any progress you have to run twice as fast. On the average, major technologies change every eighteen months, and only a few of the new ones have any staying power. If it's any comfort, I've been away from active engineering for sixteen months, and it's difficult even to read the technical literature any more, let alone be productive.

So, what can you do about this? I offer three recommendations, all of them hard to implement:

Stay Informed


Don't let yourself fall behind! Spend at least 4 hours per week keeping yourself up to date by reading technical journals or survey books (the O'Reilly series are excellent) so that you're at least aware of emerging technologies. Make learning part of your job!
Learn to spot winners and losers


You can't learn every new technologies, so you have to be selective and choose the ones that seem to have some staying power (three or more years) and those that are fads of the moment.
Learn to learn fast


You have to become very good at picking up new technologies on the fly, with minimal training. Luckily, if you've been in the business for long this won't be very hard, because most new technologies are simply repackaging of old concepts that you're already familiar with.

As I said, none of these is easy, but if you're to have a multi-decade career in engineering you're going to have to learn to deal with constant and accellerating technology change. Sorry, but that's just the way it will be.

About the Author

Bruce Taylor is the Owner and Principle of Unison Coaching, and provides corporate and executive coaching to a wide variety of businesses including engineering, human resource, consulting, and recruiting firms. Mr Taylor has extensive background in Psychology, Human Resources, and Software Engineering. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from Duke University, a Masters in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, and a Certificate in Job Stress and Healthy Workplace Design from the University of Massachusetts. He can be reached at http://www.unisoncoaching.com or bruce_taylor@unisoncoaching.com.

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