Is it all so new?
I used to be a fairly competent and technical person working in the telecom sector a couple of years ago - after the latest round of wholesale butt fcukng I now consider myself unemployable. I worked in telecoms since 1988 on a number of technologies and since about 2000 I started seeing very specific skills requirements that looked like thinly veiled age discrimination policies.
Anyone who formerly worked on fixed network infrastructures was deemed useless as far as mobile communications was concerned. Anyone who worked on ISDN and C7 signalling could not possibly comprehend the new infinitely more complex domains of VOIP, GSM/GPRS. This mentality continued down the years, having started at the bottom rung in 2001 in mobile handset development, I found that much of the old technologies were redeployed from existing specs almost unchanged into mobile comms.
Now I am on the scrap heap because I have only worked on GSM and GPRS and not on HSPA, 3G and LTE technologies.
MY POINT HERE IS: why is it necessary for the tech industry to PURGE itself of those it deems to have an antiquated knowledge base? Aren't those that have spent time learning previous technologies capable of reapplying past experiences and knowledge to the new stuff?
How can new UNIFIED COMMS architectures be developed when those that have seen the challenges of past applications are written off? Also how much of a system can you simply buy in ready made from somewhere else and integrate into your new architectures as a bunch of black boxes before you need to import the designers, testers and integrators as well?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
