Quite a lot of people are expressing this need right now. Machine Learning is hot and it clearly means many new opportunities in all possible and impossible industries. Many companies and organizations are currently crying out for competence in this area, and they are desperately searching for talented and experienced people in the field. Machine Learning has become more and more accessible and more and more people are beginning to understand the possibilities of it.
It does not matter
Unfortunately, if you replace all the times I used the term Machine Learning above with some other popular term in development, it is also true. Try replacing the term yourself with your favorite area of development. The piece still works just as well.
New techniques
There are new technologies coming out all the time and there are different technologies that are popular right now. I’m not trying to contradict myself that ML and AI represent a paradigm shift, because it is. Much more so than most other “indoor techniques” that have been popular in the past. However, it is the case that there are new techniques all the time, that is how it is in the development industry and for those who are developers it is another day at work to learn new things.
Good developer
Those who are good developers are good at adopting new technologies and applying the experience they already have. When new technologies appear that seem promising and are growing rapidly, the organizations that have the opportunity to make sure that one of their talented developers spends time learning the new technologies…and voila, they are experts in these new technologies. It is these experts that you then boast about in order to be able to add the new technology to the competence portfolio and show that you are at the forefront.
Now if it is so relatively easy (and it is) to acquire new experts in a field, is it rather the case that it is just as well to just keep using good developers and make sure they learn the new technology?
Supply and demand
When a new technology appears that seems promising or is “the next big thing”, everyone looks for experienced experts in this field. Within the development industry, there is already a lack of competence if you are satisfied with looking for “ordinary” developers. It will not be easier to find experts in a field that is relatively new.
Machine Learning exploded big around 2017-2018 as you can easily see with Google Trends it’s not that terribly long ago. The probability of finding people with long experience in this is therefore quite low.
What is the solution?
As long as you are long-term in your development investment, it matters very little exactly which technologies your developers have worked with in the past. Make sure to have as many talented developers as possible and make sure that they familiarize themselves with the techniques you need to use.
It is still the same people who will step forward and be the stars with the new technologies as the old ones, stars are stars no matter what the technology is called.