[Sigia-l] Lack of Opportunities for IA

[Listera]

"Hongming Leonard Liaw" wrote:

> Though my little incident today was rather unpleasant, I've gotten over it.

Not so fast :-) Since you're young you might want to consider several trends
that will shape the future of this job market:

Upcoming technologies (like XUL for open source, XAML for Win/Longhorn, MXML
for Flash) will increasingly allow developers to directly define interface,
navigation and interaction components procedurally, without having to use
visual tools. This will make it even more likely for them to be called upon
to perform a range of IA functions.

Growing use of web services will spawn a generation of modular,
smaller-scale apps to be loosely coupled to serve bigger needs. Unlike
slumbering, large-scale apps we are currently saddled with, these apps will
require less IA work, both in perception and in reality.

If you're in the west, offshore outsourcing will continue to erode the
availability of tech jobs. Some aspects of IA are not easily exportable,
many are. This is unfolding and inevitable.

The IA *title* will be pinched from both the left (interface designers) and
the right (developers) increasingly performing IA *functions* as adjunct to
their main tasks. This, too, is unfolding and inevitable.

During the salad days of '90s, we went through an explosion of titles, it's
not inconceivable that we might now go through a related consolidation.
While I see no diminishing need for IA functionalities, the same cannot
necessarily be said of the *title* depending on how it's defined. Already
job reqs for business analysts, data architects, UI designers, GUI
developers, etc., subsume much of IA functionalities. (Remember, for
example, perhaps the most popular/in-demand title of the 90's, web master,
is practically extinct now.)

Lastly, if you aspire to be in the enterprise IA space, it'd be difficult to
be successful without an understanding of the basics of programming and
modeling, and an ability to prototype your work. It's difficult to attain
those skills without getting your hands dirty.

Implicit in all this, of course, is the range of salaries/rates IAs can
command. It's quite compressed now. There must be a threshold below which a
steady supply of competent entrants just won't be available, along with a
corresponding feedback loop on the supply side.

These are some of the adverse factors in play, I'm sure someone will chime
in with a sunnier picture. :-)

----
Ziya

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill.
They want a quarter-inch hole.