Your skills, and how you apply them, are significant determinants of your success as a software professional. By reading this book, you have gained the fundamental knowledge required to begin learning object technology and agile techniques. The bottom line is that software development is hard; it takes skilled people to be successful at it. By making it to the end of this book you have learned the basics of modern software development; you have learned some useful concepts and techniques; you have started to get a handle on how they fit together; and you have applied them by working through the review questions and case studies. You are now in a good position to continue your learning process, a process that will last throughout your entire career. This chapter provides insight into where the software profession currently is, where it is going, what skills will be needed over the next few years, and how you can obtain those skills.

BECOME A GENERALIZING SPECIALIST

I believe that one of the biggest problems the IT industry faces is over specialization of skills. Many organizations have IT departments filled with Java specialists, database specialists, business analyst specialists, project management specialists, and so on. This approach is based on an organizational behavior paradigm called Taylorism, named after Frederick Taylor, who in his 1911 paper The Principles of Scientific Management set the stage for large-scale manufacturing.