Originally i wanted to title this article as, “When a 5 year old can publish a better website than a 15 year old website developer.” but realized this applies to us all.
We live in a world where your 9 year old child can use your computer, your phone, your tablet, your car gadgets better than you so it goes to question, could your 15 year old child be able to do your job better than you even though it isn’t really his profession? This hit me when i was building kujahapa.com, i hold a bachelors in Information technology and i love going old school, driving a manual car, building my website from scratch by writing all the code e.t.c but after more than 8 years of all this, i finally find myself fully embracing wordpress website “PUBLISHING” tools, it is a tool for website publishing where one simply chooses colors and looks from templates (just like you can do in Microsoft word), you write the text and select publish and u have your site with no actual code written, no design done, simply selecting from the millions of beautiful designs freely available or if i want a really good one i can buy it for less than 100usd, it is that easy and anyone can do it, you don’t need a skilled designer to give you a beautiful website anymore.
If i want any new fancy toys on my site, statistics, social media sharing, RSS feeds e.t.c i simply search, find a plugin / addon and select apply in 5 mins, in comparison to what i used to do, this is a zillion times easier, i can publish a beautiful site in less than 2 hours, work that would have taken me a minimum of 2 weeks is now minutes away.
Taking it to the accountants, in a world where every entry can be posted input electronically, bar code scanners scan receipts, customers make requests online, an audit and balance of books of accounts is a click away and real time financial standing is visible, go back a few years ago, u have our fathers manually posting and manually approving paper postings. We live in a world where a child can start online stocks trading at the age of 9 after watching a youtube video.
Let us pick Medicine, i can open a clinic and run it on webmd and my patients will never know that i never went to medical school. I come from a love of networking background, when we were creating VPNs and aggregating traffic E1s off command line interfaces (CLI), there was joy but the basics of those days don’t apply with the demands of these days, a VPN (Virtual Private Network) isn’t simply a VPN, it has to have various access control layers, various monitoring and management capabilities simply put, they made it two clicks in a web interface to deploy multiple lines of commands to do all the other fancy stuff i probably would have omitted or would have taken me longer to deploy the same, needless to say, my similar CLI skills are becoming very fast obsolete as we get easier less crammy cumbersome ways of doing things.
Where do we go from here;
Is knowledge and school important to a profession, It is very much important but the role of school in the information age is changing to a role of higher consulting rather than the initial basic application so if you think you are good at your job, try and project what the status of the same job will be in 5 years time.
Simon Peter
@clarsp
Ug Rocks!