When you change your dogs food, they get sick all over the place, they just can’t stomach change. As an IT professional, the dog food we know and love changes frequently.. The technology you spent all that time learning about last year is obsolete.
Don’t get mad, adapt! As a collaboration engineer, my title didn’t exist 20 years ago. During the TDM to VoIP migration, analog teleco guys were forced to adapt or find new work. When virtualization came on the map, the ability for one person to manage hundreds of servers meant that the early adopters got a new title and quite possibly a pay raise, while the ones late to the game found themselves no longer needed.
This blog is adapting, too. Let me throw out a few buzzwords: API, IoT, REST. Knowing what they mean and why they are important might save you from being the next casualty of change. It’s about asking more from technology. People don’t expect their GPS to just give them directions anymore. They want voice navigation with social networking that tells you where the cops are hiding, and they want it to predict when you’re leaving to go to work and tell you how to traffic is. From a development perspective, the GPS apps with the most APIs get the most love, and almost everything is OPEN, meaning you or I could “tap” into that technology, helping both parties.
I recently gave a presentation on coding along with the CTO of the company, Vinu Thomas. One of the points he made that really stuck was this: try to automate your own job. If you’re smart enough to do that, I promise you’ll be just fine.
I started asking during phone migrations: why do I have to tell the router what the new phone’s mac address is, if the switch already knows? Why can’t the switch and the router work this out between themselves ? Why do call center agents have to login to their phone every day if they also login to their computers ? I think we’re almost there, if not already. Both of these use cases: extension mobility and ios-xe have APIs. So do yourself a favor, hang in there, and learn Python.. or Ruby or my favorite: Node.js