What I learned in Grade School is changing
Technology changes rapidly in today’s world – not only devices but programming approaches and languages. I started my career as a programmer working in PL/I and FORTRAN (dating myself a bit, I know) in industry. Then Object-Oriented languages took over and I stuck in there for a while but found myself more of a debugger and a designer than a coder. From there, it was becoming the project manager of a team to managing a department to being a Project Management Office lead to running Operations. Coding was left behind – unless you count HTML, which I don’t. Throughout the years programming has continued to evolve with .NET, Java, and other languages. Integrations between companies and products have also evolved. Remember all those acronyms? EAI, B2B, B2C, and so forth. Some remain relevant and others are overtaken with newer terms that indicate newer technology – like the Cloud. The Cloud, just like any other technology, has its misconceptions. In talking with people, I’ve come to realize that folks assume anything that’s accessible on the internet is basically in the Cloud. How can you blame them? The Cloud term is everywhere!
So I expect technology to change, programming languages to change, platforms to change, and so on. Talking to someone in school and college always gives a new perspective on how fast technology changes. Who the heck remembers PL/I? Then again, I believe my parent’s generation has seen the most changes in technology. They witnessed the evolution of the home computer – let alone programming languages. I still remember when the microwave came out (again, dating myself).
What I don’t expect to change is the basics of what I learned in grade school. My 8-year old son brings home his Standards of Learning material that, in the state of Virginia, is an online preparation program with games to test basic knowledge levels for grades 3-5. It’s here that I learned there is a new ocean – Southern. I couldn’t believe it! When did a new ocean show up? So I had to Google it and sure enough in 2000 the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) determined there actually is a fifth ocean. I can see finding new species of animals and plant life, but a whole ocean? And in 2006, the famous 9 planet solar system became 8 planets and a dwarf with the demoting of Pluto as a planet. I just doesn’t sound right anymore – 8 planets. After all those years of memorization!
What I’ve quickly come to realize is technology is not the only thing that changes. One thing that I rely on not changing is 24 hours in a day and a defined number of hours per workday (8, in my case) so I can adequately define capacity and utilization and plan my revenue targets for the company. Then again, if someone can somehow can figure out a way to redefine a day to be more than 24 hours, I wouldn’t mind having to redo all of those budget plans and I would still have time to keep on top of things ……I’m just sayin’.
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