Moore's Law still rules in the world of technology

WIRED:It is a challenge to keep up in a world where the skills needed now are radically different from those required in 2005

EVERYONE WORRIES about the effect of technology on their jobs. Older people worry that their skills are becoming obsolete before they have a chance to retire comfortably. The young worry that the opportunities that were open to those before them are closing, and that technology threatens any concept of a stable job.

Lucrative tech jobs seemed to be a way out of this, a way of catching a ride on the very wave that was destroying everything. But now technologists seem to be the most threatened by a changing world.

Programmers who learned computer languages like C++ or Java in the 1990s find themselves surrounded by jobs that require Ruby or Javascript. Older coders whose wisdom comes from managing large projects and detailed specifications find themselves dealing with “agile” management techniques that spurn documentation and up-front design.

Young coders can see the writing on the wall. In an accelerating world, where the skillset demanded of job applicants in 2005 is radically different from that listed in 2010, how are you supposed to keep up?

Thankfully, I’m not a technologist, I’m a columnist. I don’t have any tough job choices to make because my career and industry stopped having a future circa 1998.

That’s given me lots of free time to watch how software and computing hardware builders have adapted in 20 years of breakneck change in their industry.

Will those survival strategies work in the next 20 years? Maybe not – but rules of thumb that last two decades have at least some chance of lasting. Better, certainly, than specific advice about what programming language to love but which lasts less than 18 months.

Honestly, the only guideline I have, which comes from a recurring theme in this column since it first started a decade ago, is: always accommodate Moore’s Law.

We assume the world will continue much as it is now, and for most things, including technology, that’s true. But the one constant, irrevocable area of change in the world of computing is Moore’s Law – the regular doubling in processor, speed and storage limits.

In a world of constant, slow, arithmetic development, there are parts of the tech world that have experienced insane exponential improvement for nearly 50 years. That has an effect on any tech career.

Of course, some characteristics get stuck and left like ships on sandbanks when the rest of the tide moves on and away.

Battery power doesn’t obey an exponential law; our ability to comprehend complex programs has not easily kept track of the growing complexity of our hardware and software.

The exponential increases of Moore’s Law are pushed less by a law of nature than by industry road maps and marketing departments. Nonetheless, even an artificial but long-lived principle gives those trying to synchronise careers to future innovation a hefty clue.

Think big and unique now, but assume you’ll be working small and commonplace soon. I have a friend who worked on one the world’s biggest websites, in 1998. The number of hits he got on that site would make it a middle-ranking site at best these days.

Much of his most arcane knowledge is now commonplace. But he knew the problem space first, so he knows more of the solutions.

Don’t devote your life to the details if those details are going to be washed away. The arcana of tweaking the eight-bit processors of the 1970s to work faster isn’t something that Steve Wozniak is ever going to need these days. But the details of making a beautiful product is still keeping Steve Jobs busy.

Learn general lessons from the everyday specifics, and try to apply them to every new wave. Few people now use Smalltalk, the world’s first object-oriented environments. But the people who learned general lessons from using it went on to apply them to Java, Ruby, and the web, and kick-started the agile development movement.

None of this applies to careers other than those hitched to Moore’s Law, and other careers always beckon. But Moore’s Law has a way of reaching out even to careers that seem perfectly safe.

I love speaking to biologists, for instance, because they work with the small and particular, and often do so for decades of important research. Some of the those biologist friends couldn’t believe that genetic sequencing would tumble down an exponential curve.

For them, the idea that genetic analysis would be conducted on a per person basis, and at consumer prices, just a few years after the human genome project had spent billions sequencing just one human’s DNA, seemed crazy. But as soon as genomics began to borrow the same techniques as microchip fabrication, it was inevitable.

One more thing about the every accelerating world of technology. There are plenty of opportunities to miss, but there’s always another one coming around the corner.

Success or failure is about timing, but leading an ultimately peaceful life is about consistency. I know lots of people who backed the wrong horse (or website) in the 1990s dotcom boom; who picked the wrong computer platform in the 1980s PC boom; who picked the wrong hardware in the 1970s micro-computer boom.

All of them did okay, because they understood the principle of the change, if not the details.

The next decade will be as exciting as the last. You haven’t missed a thing.