The Wolfling Project

A common interview question is "what do you see yourself doing in five years?" Usually the interviewer wants to hear something about how you'll be in the same job, with 50% more responsibility for the same money (i.e. "corporate growth opportunities").

My answer?

The job I have now didn't exist five years ago, and the job I'll have in five years doesn't exist now.

A corollary to this theory is that most of the jobs phase out in close to the same five-year time frame.

Here's a series of jobs that used to exist, that I've held, and now have vanished:

• Desktop PC support. Required A+ certification and some experience putting together PCs. Held circa 1997; vanished as a stand-alone job post Y2K.
• Trainer for PC / Networking support. As the jobs vanish, training becomes a fiction. Now superseded by online resources and a few Amazon purchases. Anyone who needs classes for IT support doesn't like it enough to be in the field.
• Source control administrator (SCM) and general systems monkey. There used to be routine consulting jobs running systems like ClearCase and ClearQuest. Most companies have moved to Perforce, most cheap companies to SVN, and most smart companies to some Git variant. That just leaves dumb companies, and they don't pay well. As of today, about ten jobs available -- in the whole country.

I'm now seeing some tightening within the release engineering positions posted. REs are prime to get a kicking, as the job is usually filled by a mid-career engineer with between 7 and 12 years of experience (translation: $$$).

In order to justify high salaries, companies are merging REs with one or more other functions -- adding responsibilities for a QA lab, or performance monitoring, or code debugging (!) to the standard job description of SCM maintenance, software deployment, and build automation.

Also, add "Junior Release Engineer" to the vanished-jobs category. There's no reason to hire anyone "junior" for this position. Hire SETs (software engineers in test) or network administrators and dump Perforce administration or build automation on them. How does this bode for more experienced REs? Consider the film Children of Men.

Note: if you are a talented and ambitious software engineer and your manager wants you to "work on a few build tools," quit. Or at least, form your own company and rake in licensing fees.