IT skills from the last century still in high demand

Linux may have won the Unix wars, but there is still a lot of Unix out there. Indeed.com lists more than 1,100 jobs for Unix system administrators, 800 related to IBM’s AIX Unix derivative and more than 1,700 positions on the Solaris platform that Sun Microsystems released in 1993. People with AIX or Solaris skills earn an average of a 9% premium above base pay, Foote Partners said.

Protocols to enable inter-program communication stick around because they become embedded in complex systems. The Component Object Model (COM) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) have both been superseded “A niche market still exists for COM developers as there are still systems that rely on COM in order to function,” he said. “We also see demand for SOAP developers, as there are many older systems still using it.”

Network platforms are also sticky because they support a host of other applications. Novell Netware lost out to the internet protocol in the late 1990s, but there were more than 140 Netware administrative and support jobs listed on Indeed.com at the time of this writing.

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) was long ago eclipsed “In many studios across America, ISDN still is the preferred means of providing studio-to-studio connections,” he said.

Among jobs that attracted bonus pay in Foote Partners’ most recent survey were HCL (formerly Lotus), Notes/Domino, PowerBuilder and Baan, an early enterprise resource planning suite that had its best days in the 1990s.

Even products that aren’t currently sold or supported can live on under a different label.

“A lot of old products get purchased and rolled into something new, but they’re still around,” Foote said.

Acquiring companies can prolong the life of aging code by absorbing it into new products that need to maintain backward compatibility.