1 post tagged “internet”

Try to think of an industry where entire business processes change every 12 months.  Think about a business where yesterday's cutting edge is today's passe.  Think about working in a field where having to relearn your entire craft every year with a new set of abstract fundamentals isn't just encouraged but required to succeed at even a minimal level. 

Industries like entertainment and fashion come to mind - where what's in today is out tomorrow and what the consumer wants is what they are told they want.  All in all though, they are still just making movies; recording albums; selling clothes.  The automobile industry - every single manufacturer has a one year release cycle with major revisions ranging from 3-5 years (albeit some are faster, some are slower); but last I checked, cars still have 4 wheels, and engine, some seats, and a handfull of other miscellany that gets it's passengers from A to B. Manufacturing, retail, finance, medicine, law.  Most of these fields are as old as "business" itself.  General stores of old have become today's Walmart.  Doctors way back when might have been using leeches and blood-letting, but they were arguably still fundamentally the same as doctors today. Time and technology change the way the business is run, but don't change the business.

Maybe I'm biased - alright, I'm definitely biased - but there's no business in the history of the world that's as fast paced and metamorphical than the business of tech.   In the past 20 some-odd years (my lifetime), a bulk of the world's citizens have gone from being an island unto themselves to a member of a connected global community.  We now live in a world where a seemingly infinite amount of information is at the fingertips of anyone willing the pay the (seemingly) low price of admission.  But it's not the politicians who made this possible (though they would have you believe otherwise) nor is it financial leaders.  It's not this country or that country.  It's not one man, but many.  It's the nerds of the world, the geeks, the dorks, the enthusiasts, the fanboys.  A field that barely even existed 20 years ago is now one of (if not) the most profitable industries ever.  We're designers, developers, programmers and digital artists alike and without us there would be no ebay, no google, no myspace, no youtube.  8 of the top ten visited websites in the US (from Alexa) were born out of basements, garages, apartments, and lofts.  Of those 8, exactly ZERO started as a for-profit venture, but all of them ended up there. 

The business moves faster than most on the outside of it even consider.  In the last few years alone we've seen a drastic shift toward lite, web-based applications; toward user generated content; toward free, sponsor based services.   Not only that, but the tech moved with it.  From static HTML to PERL to straightforward PHP to frameworks (with many, many steps in between).  Each step forward in hindsight was a leap in response to the ever changing world we work in.  Sure, 90 or so percent of the world still uses IE 6, but they all want to experience their crappy, low-res youtube movies in the same way - on their time, as fast as possible.  As bandwidth becomes cheaper and more widely available that trend will keep growing exponentially and we are the ones that are forced to keep up.

In my short time as a gainfully employed web designer / developer my career has seen 3 major shifts (to standards compliant web development, to dynamic online data driven applications, and now on to version controlled framework based development) and I've never left the only job I've had.  All in response to an industry that shows no signs of stopping. 

What does the future hold for me and my cohorts?  No one can really definitively say for sure.  I can only hope to be able to spend enough time learning in what little free time I have in order to keep up and that maybe I can make a small mark on the world that's big enough for at least one or two people to notice.