2021 has come. Looking back on the past year, we can feel that from the country to the enterprise, to the production and manufacturing, to the personal life, the expectations and requirements of the IT industry are higher and more urgent than any previous year. Although the customer's requirements are still fulfilled through coding, the requirements for the capabilities of the IT industry personnel, especially the capabilities of the programmers, have been significantly improved.
The requirements that customers put forward to the import system are quite different than in the past. Even the common ERP enterprise management system is not only as simple and isolated as designing a process, building a database, writing an operation interface, and making an output report. jobs. In order to adapt to the informatization, intelligence, and digitization requirements of future enterprise management and production, many customers have begun to make new/renovated system requirements more systematic. For example, the system architecture should adopt the form of platform (data center, business center, etc.) , System development requires the use of configuration methods (less code, low code, etc., to facilitate efficient development and future customer self-maintenance), intelligent business processing (input methods have automatic functions, new terminal applications), and the interconnection of information islands (different It is obvious that such a customer’s needs must be fulfilled by demand engineers traditionally to achieve such a customer’s needs, such as building systems, domestic and foreign languages, multiple languages), and a variety of IoT application systems (unlimited demand forms, increased cross-industry knowledge), etc. The process model of requirement research and specification, and then coding and development by programmers is no longer applicable. Such a system can be regarded as a set of "mechanisms" with strong combination capabilities, which can support customer systems to achieve on-demand and contingency requirements. The system is no longer a concept of a simple functional aggregate. It can be said that " This system" is no longer the "other system".
When designing such a system, because the distinction between "business" and "technology" is more blurred, the person in charge needs to have strong logical thinking, abstract modeling capabilities, and a large amount of requirements analysis, planning, architecture, and detailed design work. It is difficult for engineers without a computer background to participate. Unfortunately, in reality, most demand engineers do not have a development background, and most programmers who understand coding techniques do not have the ability to analyze and design, and lack the ability to think across boundaries. I often see many programmers who have less than 10 years of development experience (or even more). They can code but do not understand what a system is (coding is not equal to a system), and they cannot do analysis (the ability to think logically is weak), Can do design (almost not expressed in pictures), so basically can not solve the aforementioned new customer needs, can only do the coding of individual components (and need to give him a detailed explanation).
With the increasing demand of such customers (I am sure there will be more and more!), there has been such a contradiction: one side is the lack of a large number of high-end technical talents who can meet the new needs of customers, and the other is the 35-year-old thinking about it. A group of "retired" programmers. As an engineer, 35 years old is the age when you have just gained trust in any industry to take on important tasks and your career begins to reach the peak, because no matter which industry you want to complete a high-level, high-value product, 10 years of knowledge and experience can only It's a foundation. It can be said that the problem of programmers is not the problem of age (35 years old in other industries is a young man, only in the IT industry as an "old man"?!), the reason for this contradiction problem lies in: old programmers have accumulated 10 years The above knowledge and experience, and the reward for 10 years of service, but did not go up, and still stayed in place to compete with the later people with only 3 to 5 years of experience, doing similar work to them! So whether a 35-year-old programmer needs to change careers (to non-software industry) is a false proposition!
The world woven with code is a space that can create infinite possibilities. As an excellent programmer, don’t just stay at the lowest end of this space to do things. Undoubtedly, to adapt to future needs, relying only on the coding ability you have mastered is far from enough. Yes, if you master the analysis and design capabilities on the basis of the accumulated coding knowledge and experience, it is equivalent to gaining a ladder to create high-end. If the two capabilities of analysis design and coding development complement, promote, and improve each other, the effect of 1+1>2 can be exerted. Once the programmer has this ability, he can directly obtain, analyze and design user needs (very important! ), it is possible to challenge and realize the aforementioned new customer needs. When the programmer has the above-mentioned abilities, you can enter the level of innovation and creation from the level of doing repetitive work every day, and then enter the free zone of work and the comfort zone of your career.
The new year has come. I hope that the majority of software engineers (especially programmers!) will seize the time, set new goals, master new knowledge, meet new challenges, climb new heights, and make 2021 their careers. Turning point!