Introduction
Computing professions are often considered as professions wherein technical skills and creativity are extremely important. Computing professionals often deal with computer hardware and software. Some examples of computing professions include computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, telecom engineers, and systems analysts. Of course, these people do a variety of jobs but it can easily be distinguished that whatever type of job description they have, it could still be somewhat related to computing. The objective of this paper is to outline the possible future of the computing profession in the next couple of years and even decades.
The Future of the Computing Profession
As of now, there are a lot of types of computing professions that different local and international companies require. Most of these computing professions or simply company positions did not even exist before. For example, during the early 70s up to the early 90s, individuals with either a computer technician or a computer programmer degree seem to have dominated the entire computing industry. The entire industry used to mass employ individuals with such degrees. Now, we have a whole new range of computing professions or positions and at some point, computer technicians and programmers are not that in-demand anymore. Computational scientists, computer operators, application analysts, and even hackers are some of the best examples of the emerging computing professions today.
10 years from now, the computing industry will have been dominated by cloud computing technologies as people try to look for better, more efficient and more secure ways to store their personal files, and possibly, share particular files with others (Weiss, 2005, 18-19). 25 years from now, social computing will be the latest trend due to the increase in number of organizations that rely on virtual management and e-commerce. In fact, a considerable number of organizations are already using social computing techniques to market and advertise the company and its services. Another reason is that social computing enables businesses to have a more proactive customer service and engagement system. 30 years from now, the trend will be directed towards mobile computing. Everything that we see now will be converted to its miniature version. Palm computers will become the successors of the current generation of smartphones and tablet computers. These miniature devices shall have equal or even greater computing capabilities than their older and relatively more spacious predecessors.
The jobs that are likely to change would be the computer programming jobs. Actually, the more correct term would be subdivided. As new technologies are introduced, more programming specialties will emerge and thus, new types of computing professions will be available.
Identifying Risks
The first risk is the relatively new technology. Being a newly-introduced technology, we can be sure enough that very few to no people have received the necessary training programs, seminars and workshops to utilize such technology. The second risk would be the number of people involved to complete the new project. It usually takes more than 10 or even 20 people to create a decent, usable application system. Employing only ten developers to finish the project would rather be difficult than challenging. The third risk here would be the six-month deadline proposed by the manager. Some application development teams take years to develop even a simple application system. Application development usually takes that long because developers and programmers usually have to deal with long lines of codes and conduct tests to ensure that the application will run perfectly and smoothly (Cunningham, 2011). All these three risks can actually lead to one thing. The application system that may come as a result of the company’s efforts could be defective and worse, unusable. However, the manager could still do some steps to mitigate the effects should worse come to worst. The manager can carefully manage the time available to conduct a knowledgeable-enough but reliable team of developers. He can also request the management to extend the deadline. And more effectively, he could increase the size of his development team to 30. Doing any and preferably all of these strategies would not only minimize the possible implications of the risks, it can also serve as a modest mitigation strategy.
Works Cited
Armbrust, M., fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A., katz, R., Konwinski, A., Lee, G., Patterson, D., Rabkin, A., Stoica, I., & Zaharia, M., 2010. A View of Cloud Computing. ACM Digital Library.
Cunningham, D., 2011. What will the Software Industry Look Like in 3, 5, even 10 yers from now. U.S.: Informatica.
Weiss, A., 2005. Computing in the Clouds. Universidad Federal de Pernambuco.
