Can You Catch Up With Technology? 9
MmmmJoel asks: "I'm currently a junior in college and am considering volunteering with the Peace Corps after graduation. Being in the computer field, I'm worried that the pace of technology may make it extremely challenging to catch up after a two-year absence. How hard is it to be completely isolated from technology for two years and come back strong? Is getting a job more difficult?"
Some thoughts (Score:3)
2. You'll be playing catch-up whether you're isolated, or in the thick of it. Staying up to date is a choice few choose to make. Most are happy to be stale.
3. It's about life and living. Go. Have fun. I know several folks who have done the Peace Corps gig, and it was a life-altering experience. Experience the bio-mass. See other cultures. You can Geek the rest of your life, but few of us have the chance to spend serious time overseas, and fewer still of us take those chances.
100% Right (Score:3)
Worst case, you miss out on IPv6 and have to come back and sit down with a book and learn about it. Best case, you miss out on IPv6, and they come out with IPv8 before you get back, saving you from learing the middle-step.
And yes, think of the learning experience. I'm not in a position where I can uproot myself and see the world. I'm envious of your opportunity. Well, make the descision that works best for you, and go with what feels right. Just dont make the descision based on some unfeeling bits of copper and electrical signals that will be here when you get back.
-Josh
Do it now! (Score:1)
If you don't do it now, you'll never do it (unless the IPO market picks back up).
I stayed in graduate school for about 3 years after seeing Mosaic, checking out yahoo.stanford.edu and lycos.cs.cmu.edu, and laughing at this stupid kid that was going to start a company called Netscape and build a better browser.
If I could recover from that, you could do 2 years in Ghana or wherever and make it.
Who says you have to be isolated from technology? (Score:3)
I found no real problems... (Score:1)
On returning to the UK CD-ROMS were all the rage and the Internet was startin to boom. I got a job working for a multimedia company and quickly managed to pick up C++ and Windows programming. Five years later I am working as a tech lead in a leading internet company.
It took a lot of work and quite a few late nights getting my head around the new technologies, but the skills required to write solid code and plan a project have not changed form the days of the ZX-81 (and before that I think).
As the others have said, go for it, wherever you are you can still pop in here once in a while and check up on the latest stuff...
A few thoughts (Score:3)
However, if you were dumb and got some time-limited degree like "IT Systems" or something then maybe you WILL get behind in 2 years with no exposure to tech. So why not do your volunteering with an organization that needs techs? Surely the Peace Corp runs a website or a database or something that needs looking after.
If you can't find such an org (or the existing orgs don't need you for that) then you have two choices: 1) don't volunteer 2) realize that volunteering requires sacrifice--that's not just a word, it's a real thing. It means you have to give something up.
--
"Catching up" implies continuous progress (Score:1)
A completely different issue is how prospective employers will view your n-year absence.
Getting a job afterwards requires more effort (Score:1)
Other people here have already discussed how you shouldn't need to worry about catching up with technology. Essentially, if you're getting a strong background in tech at school, it should not be too hard to find out how the new trends fit with what you already know. Talk to some of your classmates when you get back, and then get some books, and then write small apps on your own to test what you've learned.
As for getting a job afterwards, your main problem there would be whether or not a machine is scanning your resume. If so, the machine is likely to look for recent buzzwords that you won't have, and you'll get dismissed very quickly.
If you get a human to look at your resume, you may be lucky in that that person could be very intrigued by your experiences in the Peace Corps. Since most companies prefer to hire referrals rather than outsiders, this is the best approach in any case. Read Ask the Headhunter [asktheheadhunter.com] for very different, very gutsy, and (IMO) very sensible approach to doing this. The author (a headhunter) tends to overstate his point a little, but it's still very useful.
If you stick to a more traditional job-seeking approach, try larger companies that are not strictly tech-focused. (e.g., banks, and not software companies.) Companies like these typically are more willing to spend money on training, so you can get some work experience and some on the job training, and then you're in a better position to move on.
After you've spent two years in the Peace Corps, I wonder if you'll even want to go into the IT field. You're embarking on a very big, and possibly life-altering experience, so keep in mind that who you are now, and what you want to do with your life now, may be very different from who will be then. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but I'd advise you to simply keep that possibility in mind.
Go for it (Score:2)
I wasn't one of the early adopters. I had to play catch up. But, guess what? I didn't start off with Netscape Navigator HTML extensions and its perculiar JavaScript. Instead, I started learning HTML, DOM (1&2), ECMAScript in late 1998 and early 1999. Now, even Netscape has abandoned the Navigator-only extensions (Layers, for example) in favor of W3C, et al, standards.
Moral? Sometimes it pays not to be leading the pack...sometimes hanging back and seeing where you're going will help you leap frog over the early adopters.
More importantly: doing something non-technical is good for your humanity. Return to technoology after the Peace Corp with a matured character, wisened outlook. That's what counts.
(My .sig finishes the tale...)
Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers