Which dev skills have the longest shelf-life?

**bobspud** · 5 September 2012, 19:11

Architecture roles without a doubt. I have been peddling the same skills for 10 years.

Top of the tree is Enterprise Architecture. £800 a day for TOGAF and lots of H models and UML

KA-CHING!!!!

**Spacecadet** · 5 September 2012, 19:28

I've been doing SQL since 1999 and pretty much pure SQL Server for the past 8 years
Barely had 3 months out of work/contract in that time

**northernladuk** · 5 September 2012, 19:38

Are you a contractor now? How will you learn and more importantly apply these skills?

**VectraMan** · 5 September 2012, 19:39

People have been predicting the death of C++ for years, but somehow I still get paid to do it. But it's a lot more of a niche thing than it used to be, and if you look at the job ads most C++ jobs are looking for people from maths and/or physics academia, which shows the kind of places C++ is typically used these days.

If I'd been a bit smarter about my career, I'd have learned a lot more about SQLServer and jumped on the C#/ASP.NET bandwagon.

**doodab** · 5 September 2012, 19:43

Even with long lived skills the basic language might not change that much but APIs and development environments evolve, so although there are core skills that will always be useful you still need to invest a bit of effort in keeping up to date in order to be able to apply them to a real project.

**nomadd** · 5 September 2012, 19:54

Originally posted by TTheTTTTT View Post

Greetings!

I am a techie at heart and enjoy programming & software development. However, I also feel that life is too short to be re-training every few years in the latest here-today-gone-in-a-few-years programming-language or development-technology.

I've been trying to think of which skills are likely to have the longest shelf-life, from a point of view of earning a living. I'm not too bothered about earning the highest rate (whether contract or permie), but I am concerned with having enough opportunities such that I can work in whatever area of the UK I like (e.g. Manchester, Birmingham, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leeds).

An idea I had is that the newer and more advanced languages/dev-technologies seem to have a shorter shelf-life, such that they get updated or even replaced by something else a lot more frequently than the older and simpler languages. For example, VB skills were in huge demand in the late 1990's but nowadays it seems to be C#.Net and Java that are the more in-demand programming skills. How many versions of C# & .Net have there been over the last 10 years? Meanwhile, older skills such as C, C++ and COBOL are still lingering around and not being updated or replaced anywhere near as frequently.

I'm thinking that maybe my time would be better spent learning an older language such as C, C++ or COBOL, which may not be in as high a demand or as well-paid as C# or Java programming, but might keep me in work longer with less need to keep re-training.

What do you esteemed CUK'ers think?

Thanks,
TTheTTTTT

New sockie?

**Cliphead** · 5 September 2012, 20:15

No gaps in the CV doing Unix / Linux sysadmin stuff with a wee bit of PHP and various scripting languages. Started as a dev but abandoned that along with DOS. Doing more DBA stuff now as well and some SQL for reporting.

**NotAllThere** · 5 September 2012, 20:23

I've been doing ABAP for 15 years.

**darmstadt** · 5 September 2012, 20:23

Mainframe tulip for nearly 30 years now and its still going strong (with a sideline of little systems as well.) Just do what you're best at...

Which dev skills have the longest shelf-life?