Thriving, or even surviving in Tech industry is not easy. It is particularly difficult for people who are complacent and want to live off of their ‘experience’ alone and are not learning new things. There is a constant demand to upgrade and up-skill yourself or else you will become outdated (and of no value) soon. This is not only true for core software engineering jobs, but also equally true for other roles such as Design, Product Management, Marketing, and pretty much all other roles too. Just the degree or pace may vary slightly.

If you compare this with other industries such as Banking, Medical field, Academics, Scientific Research and so on, on the surface it may look like experience wins here and the more time you have spent working, the better you are (generally speaking).

I was discussing this with a friend today and we discussed that it is not true if we examine the situation little more in depth. Digitization and Automation is literally changing these industries in very fundamental ways. Retail as we knew it is nearly dead; People are not going to the banks now (obviously Covid has a larger role here) and banks are probably going to cut large number of jobs; Teachers are adopting new methods of teaching to stay relevant, interesting, and current; Scientific Research is impacted by Technologies like Big Data and Machine Learning; Medical field is witnessing a lot of technological intervention itself. Everything is changing.

In other words, probably those other industries are actually harder hit by Technology in ways that the older jobs won’t even be there anymore and complete replacements will occur. Automation obviously is going to reduce the overall head count. In contrast if you are in the Tech industry, all you have to do is to up-skill and upgrade yourself (and keep doing it over time) and embrace the change which you are already a part of.

To succeed in Tech may not be that hard after-all. What are your views?