Back to the Future: The Tech skills as valuable as ever

Originally Posted on LinkedIn - November 2015

In an interesting twist on the old adage that you "can't teach old dogs new tricks", it seems that Brooklyn is teaching new dogs old tricks - and it's great news for the technology industry.

Even though the modern IT world has a "cool factor" associated with mobile and web apps being designed by people with no formal technology training, the newest generations of Developers and Engineers are been steered towards older technologies such as C++ and Java rather than being brought up on single OS programming languages such as Swift. As fun as it may be to develop "vanity projects" for Apple products, generally employers look for a stronger grounding in the basics of development amongst job applicants. Recognising this need to encourage the young to go 'back to the future', Brooklyn businesses have taken firm action. 

The Tech Triangle U, an event held by the Brooklyn Tech Triangle to connect the technology, creative and academic industries, was one of the first events GCS attended after announcing plans to open a New York office. It was truly great to see such enthusiasm for encouraging younger people, especially those who may not have the financial backing to attend University, to look into the basics of coding and demonstrating the potential of exciting and progressive careers within the Technology industry.

It's a similar approach to how certain schools (at least in the UK) used to teach Latin as a gateway language to prepare students for other romance languages such as French, Italian and Spanish. In the same way as you would be hard pressed to find active Latin users in this day and age, few young developers will take jobs solely coding in C++ - but a solid knowledge of this acts as a sturdy foundation for progress into other areas of development, such as Python and JavaScript.

Given the rising demand for technology talent, not only in New York but across the world, increasingly more clients are prepared to look at candidates who are self-taught rather than formally trained or educated. Our advice for anybody considering a future within development is to take advantage of the open source revolution, romance Ruby, serenade Scala and embrace Erlang, but above all else, go back to basics and the skills that paved the way for the development industry of the present - Java and C++.