The Shelf Life of a Techie Is Now Just 15 Years!


Mukund Mohan, CEO of Microsoft's startup accelerator programme in India, says the shelf life of certain kinds of developers has shrunk to less than a year. "My daughter developed an app for iPhone 4. Today, she is redeveloping the app to make it smarter for iPhone 5. Five years ago, developers were talking Symbian (the Nokia operating system). Today, it's not very relevant. You have to look at Android or iOS or may be even Windows 8 to stay relevant."

And as for Shailesh Thakurdesai, business development manager at Texas Instruments India, college hiring is a priority for the company because "freshers learn fast and do things differently, without the baggage of past experience". This semiconductor company has to constantly deal with the challenge of rapid miniaturization of integrated circuits and changes in the associated design software.

V R Ferose, MD SAP Labs says “the pace at which technology is changing, at 35 if you are not learning yourself, you will become redundant very quickly. We find people after 40 finding it very difficult to be relevant. They have missed a whole learning cycle. I'm always telling my people, 'be paranoid to learn’.” "Also, some companies guide technical professionals towards taking on more managerial responsibilities over time,” he added.

Ravi Shankar, chief people officer at MindTree, says he advises employees to map their career graph into a 5-5-5 formula, three blocks of 5 years each. First five years the employee contributes technically, and in next five years the employee should move on to become a team leader or an architect,  and subsequently the employee should take on with stronger leadership responsibilities, with technical skill upgrades.