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Tech Talk: The fate of developers (and the future of mobile)

These could be the best of times, or the worst of times to be a developer, given how fast technology (and skills) change. Our experts weigh in on that conundrum – and on what we learned from Mobile World Congress.

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The good news, if you're a developer (or hope to be one) is that it's a lot easier than it used to be break into the field. The bad news is that the skills you have now, or learn today, may not be useful for as long as they were, say, 20 years ago.

As Infoworld's Serdar Yegulalp noted: Think about all the Adobe Flash developers whose careers are on the rocks now that Flash has largely become a dead end.

Yegulalp, PC World's Michael Simon and Computerworld Executive Editor Ken Mingis talked about what it takes to be a developer these days, and difficult it can be to stay on top of the skills needed to be a success. 

From there, our trio of experts looked back at this year's Mobile World Congress – where Samsung's new Galaxy S9 and 5G plans were big topics of discussion – and revisited a perennial issue: Android fragmentation. Mingis pointed to Computerworld blogger JR Raphael's latest Android upgrade report card, which offers less-than hopeful data about the pace of upgrades. Most carriers are falling behind, Raphael found, and are doing an even worse job than they used to.

If you want skip around among the topics we cover:

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