Do you know that Singapore's Prime Minister, Mr Lee Hsien Loong, wrote a code to solve sudoku last year May and actually visited major tech companies like Facebook and Google this year February?
Have you heard of the words like Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning Algorithm, Business Intelligence or Data Science?
Are you one of those people who believes that programmers are those geeks working in IT departments and their most notable accomplishment would be to solve your daily tech issues?
Did it ever cross your mind that one day, all jobs will disappear because mankind has found ways to automate all processes with programs and machines?
The information age that we live in is transforming at a faster rate than we think.
Entry barriers are fading and prices are becoming more and more transparent.
With this growing phenomenon, middlemen are being eliminated. Soon, jobs like insurance agents, real estate agents, bankers, accountants, sales and marketing professionals are going to disappear.
Imagine a website or application that can easily allow you to compare the prices of all the insurance policies/real estate, catered to your very specific needs and have immediate answers to all your queries with no hidden agenda.
Long gone are the days where one needs to queue to withdraw or deposit their money at a bank. You can now transfer funds to multiple parties on your phone while shopping for groceries.
With more and more electronic transactions being carried out by business, record keeping becomes more accurate and organised. This means that a well written program can now do a much better and faster job than an experienced accountant.
As the world evolves, long gone are the days when the media or sales people influences consumer habits. We now have ways to discover new products that is exactly what we want with plenty of price and brand comparisons available at our finger tips.
So what is not becoming obsolete?
Rather than fighting the evolution, why not be part of it?
Programming language is becoming the language of the future. Automation is the only way forward because automation means cost reduction and cost reduction means higher profits.
Companies that resist moving towards this inevitable trend will eventually die as newer competitors chisel any edge with state-of-the-art technology powered by abundance of data that these dinosaurs fail to value.
For myself, I am currently learning Python from www.codeacademy.com with the aim of being really proficient at it.
Ignore this tide of change at your own peril.
Let me know what you think by commenting on this post.
