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i've seen some people complain in that manner.

not sure if this applies to you directly, but here's my 2¢:

1. a lot of people fall for the meme and drink the koolaid that if you spend 6+ years doing nothing more than studying then BOOM, you'll graduate and companies will just blindly start throwing money at your face. surprise surprise, it doesn't work like that.

2. people should follow their passion and everything but they should also at least keep an eye on the market.

3. students (not universities) should really start considering an university course unfinished without some kind of internship. if you manage to get an internship in a company that uses the tech you're interested into (in your case, gis) you can either realize you don't like it that much or understand what the direction for your studies need to be in order to be more proficient. (applying for internships is sampling the market, btw)

4. specialists are only needed up to a certain points. in most situations a good generalists can learn enough to get the ball rolling and bring home results. see like an 80-20 pareto principle or something like that. btw, a good generalist can surpass a specialist over time.

> I blame the internet and the accessibility of knowledge to the point where people can go "IDK WTF this is, but lemme google it".

the people you complain about probably can already do a lot of other useful stuff, to the point they can just "lemme google it".


Not his or her fault the tooling obseleted the specialty knowledge.


I think it's more that the tooling has been commoditised. Historically, professional GIS was very much about Esri's tools (and, to a lesser extent, MapInfo). Your employability was directly linked to your ArcGIS proficiency.

Now, there's a massive ecosystem of open-source GIS: PostGIS is probably the standout, but also QGIS, everything around OSM, GDAL/OGR, and a hundred others. For government work and some parts of academia then Esri still dominates, but there's now much more to "geo".


This right here. GIS is accessible to anyone who knows Javascript, Python, and SQL thanks to the open source GIS ecosystem. Previously it was the sole domain of ESRI priests.

Now this is a net good thing, but there are downsides. Generalists wielding specialist tools means that a lot of the wonky basics aren't known until things break. But this is a blip compared to the step-change of making an entire field accessible to anyone who's a decent programmer with a healthy appetite for research. It's crazy how much you can spin up with PostGIS, Python, Mapbox and/or Leaflet...no ESRI license needed.


Indeed. This was my experience when a nonprofit in my area set up their geomapping for Covid-19 support. There was of course some domain growth, but I was super impressed with the tooling. Even more so now that networkx and Qneat3 support other topological use cases. All and all exciting stuff.


I was doing ArcGis about 10 years ago and it was amazing the quality of the free maps MN data deli provided. Your comment makes me excited to try out these new tools even tho I mainly do front end work now. It’s a great time to be a programmer!


Lucky for you, it's also a golden age for frontend GIS. I'm a big fan of https://vis.gl/


It’s who you know, not what you know.




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