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Weekly News: IT Professionals Feeling Confident Lately

A renewed sense of confidence for IT professionals

A new report from SolarWinds suggests that IT professionals are feeling more confident during the pandemic. Thus, according to the survey, tech experts admit to having been more proactive in bringing new ideas to the table and taking on a bigger role.

Also, experts believe this newfound confidence is the result of IT pros being used to sudden shifts and unexpected situations – a quality that has helped them ride the Covid-19 wave as opposed to being swept by it.

IT has been pivotal to business resilience during this unprecedented crisis, elevating tech experts within their organisations and putting them closer to the decision-making process.

Luckily, it looks like things will stay this way.

ITProPortal

IT professionals: Bye to VS Codespaces and Flash Player

Microsoft has decided to end Visual Studio Codespaces (formerly known as Visual Studio Online). The cloud-based development environment will then be merged with GitHub’s version of the same product.

Microsoft’s move comes after some developers expressed confusion between the two nearly-identical products. Unfortunately for developers, there is currently no way to migrate existing projects from one platform to the other.

The company has also warned businesses to get ready for the end of Adobe Flash Player support. Microsoft and Adobe first announced the phase-out of the popular internet media player in 2017. From January 21, Flash will be disabled in both IE 11 and Microsft Edge browsers.

ZDNet / TechRepublic

IT professionals: IT jobs are booming in the UK

IT professionals are feeling more confident so that the government-funded think tank Tech Nation reports a 36% increase in tech vacancies between June and August.

The sector is experiencing a fast recovery compared to other industries, with 90,000 new jobs being advertised every week across the UK.

The most sought-after skills identified in the report include:

Engineering
.net
Javascript
Java
C++
Data
SQL
Python
Amazon Web Service
Client

CBR

C++ just got an A+

Tiobe Software’s latest Programming Community index points at a revival of C++.

The 35-year-old language is the fastest growing language in terms of popularity, while C tops the list of most used languages.

Experts at the company believe the new C++20 standard is responsible for the recent uptick, moreover, the standard includes a new modules feature which replaces the infamous include mechanism function.

Other languages gaining popularity are R and C#, whereas Java has experienced a drop compared to last year.

ADT Mag

Weekly News: The Best Language for Economic Research

The Best Language for Economic Research

Python, Matlab, Julia — R. Who would win the battle of the best language for Economic research? That’s probably one of the most common online queries in the programming world. There is just something about humans and our obsession with chasing the very best of the best.

In reality, of course, each language has its nuances and areas in which it shines. Anyone claiming to have a definitive answer on the matter should come up with some solid arguments to back their verdict.

And that’s exactly what two London School of Economics researchers did. They looked at different languages based on the power of available libraries, the speed and possibilities when handling large datasets, and the speed and ease-of-use for a computationally intensive task.

Hint: the winner has a woman’s name.

Thanks, but no thanks

That’s the polite version of what UK students were shouting in front of the Department of Education over a week ago. The cause of their anger was an algorithm.

University admission exams had been cancelled because of the pandemic. Teachers proposed predicting their student’s scores as a way to compromise. The education department dismissed the idea on the grounds that previous research had proved such estimates to be biased. Instead, they decided to use an algorithm.

Well, that one turned out to be even more biased. Close to 40% of students received lower grades than what their teachers had predicted, potentially harming their chances to get into their university of choice. Those in working-class and disadvantaged communities were disproportionately affected.

The issue has now been fixed, but it’s a textbook examples of the dangers of AI bias.