Developers won’t go too far with only technical skills

“Today’s [IT] job opportunities are not purely technical, so [developers] won’t go too far with only technical skills. They also need to be more business-oriented and have skills that will help businesses realize more value from their IT investments.

That’s what a Gartner senior consultant had to say about IT hiring today. Is this the way things will shape up in the near future?

Demand for enterprise devs with both technical and business skills will rise in the next 12 months, says a just-released survey of IT managers from Gartner Inc.

The pure techies already get a far lower pay than the ‘business domain experts’ and with more companies now looking for business skills in developers, will we see a further dilution of interest in the purely technical?

So what’s a better choice for developers?

Investing time primarily in studying and getting business knoweldge in a specific domain or in trying to master the latest in Java J2EE… ?

0 thoughts on “Developers won’t go too far with only technical skills

  • March 8, 2007 at 8:54 am
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    Two Chimps and a racoon could have written a better JAVA book. If you need this bozo to teach you how to program, then you don’t need to be using a computer.

  • August 1, 2005 at 12:04 pm
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    Go for building business skills if you don’t enjoy working with technology and short term money is your chief concern. If you are really good at technology, in the long run you should do just as well if not better than even the smart MBAs.

    Some understanding of business does help while development but converting good experienced developers into domain experts who will stay away from development and get work done from fresh/inexperienced developers, is stupid.

  • August 1, 2005 at 5:44 am
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    The business guys or even b-school freshers with minimal or no business experience are making a ton of money while even brilliant developers / techies are making a fraction of it.

    The primary reason I beleive is that techies have hardly any say in management.

    So the old and established bschool folk get in new b-school kids under the excuse that they need business expertise> pay them a lot of money and ignore the techies.

    The techies keep working 14 hour days hoping that someday they will make as much money as a MBA makes just out of college.

    It’s a secret b-school network at work, meant to ensure that even dumb MBAs make more money than brilliant technology people.

    I would recommend an MBA or some so called ‘business skill’ anyday over technical skills.

    Business skills is anyway such a vague notion that even if you knew nothing, you could very well get away with it, if you can throw enough jargon and acronyms.

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