It’s not enough to be just business-savvy, especially in a technology venture — one must also be tech-savvy. Despite what people say about why today is a bad day to begin majoring in computer science because all the jobs in the US are being offshored to China and India, I still humbly largely disagree, because tech companies are still hungry for talent.
Obviously, with globalization and the flattening of the world, if all you do at work is push a button, then your job is most probably by and large a candidate for offshoring. If someone in China or India can push the same button for a fraction of what you’re being paid ..why should the company not use them? The point I’m trying to make is that it’s still great to be in tech – as long as you’re not complacent. You have to differentiate yourself and actually be useful/valuable (imagine that!)
Why are science and technology so important today? We are living in times of intense change, a point I tried to cover in my post on Innovation last week. In any kind of system or organization, the more components the system has, the faster those individual components are changing, and the more integrated the components are, the harder it is to predict how that system or organization will evolve into the future. The system becomes “emergent,” a term used to describe highly interactive, complex systems whose behavior — indeed, whose very nature — is essentially unpredictable.
It is not hard to see how our world, its institutions, perhaps even our personal lives are becoming increasingly “emergent”, that is, hard to predict. Technology is changing at a prodigious rate, new products and services are born almost every day, and to top it all off, ever since the Internet hit in the mid ’90s, we are living in an increasingly interconnected, global world. If your business and/or your life feel more chaotic . . . . it is because they are. (Or, at least, they look chaotic through the lens of our familiar paradigms.)
And .. the reason why I wake up in the morning, the reason why I’m proud to be a computer scientist,
To a good scientist or engineer, all this complexity and seeming unpredictability is fun. It’s in times like these that the most important innovations happen. Scientists love to explain what is going on in a complex world in the simplest, most elegant way possible, so you can analyze the options, make sense of what is going on, and take the proper actions. Engineers love to solve problems and build things, and the more sophisticated the problem or thing you want to design and build, the more good engineering you need.
Emphasis is mine. Cutting through complexity is not just an important technical skill to have, it’s an important business skill for CEOs as well. “Cutting through clutter” is something Ram Charan talks about. I’ve blogged about him here and here before.
Even in times of a less than stellar economic, cutting back on R&D may not be a wise decision. Just a few weeks ago I wrote about how technology is a competitive advantage – something I’ve always believed in.
According to research firm Gartner, “It can be hard for a business to stay ahead if its technology is falling behind. That is one reason that despite an uncertain economy, worldwide information technology spending is on track to reach $3.4 trillion in 2008 — an 8 percent increase over 2007.â€
PC sales (especially laptops) are surprisingly stronger than expected, according to S&P’s Equity Research. “The latest evidence came from the Aug. 19 earnings report from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which said unit shipments of PCs rose 20% from a year agoâ€
A point that Irwing also made in his blog post:
[...] businesses that hire and nurture their technical talent by investing in research and development will be in a much better position to cope with technology and market changes than their competitors. And those countries or regions that have first-rate technical talent will be in a much better position to cope with, adjust to and thrive in a fast-changing, emergent world.
A quick plug for my company: I work in the R&D arm of Websense, and we’re hiring for a security researcher – drop me an email if you’re interested!
Great time to be a techie – and an even better time to be techie with fundamental business and entrepreneurship mad skillz!
For the entire blog post from Irving, click here.
Tags: innovation