For the past few years, I am hearing a lot about problem-solving(PS) skills. The curriculum has been redesigned focussing on problem-solving and everyone seems to be talking about it. Job Descriptions are using such words which were not so common 10 years back.
So my question is why PS has suddenly become so important now. I know it is important but I am asking what is causing this sudden surge in the demand for problem-solving skills.
Thank you very much.
Problem solving skills have always been valued, but here is a reason they are growing in significance:
Turnover and lack of training
People used to join one company and remain for life. They would learn from the other lifers who were just a bit older. Companies had formal training programs which helped people understand how things were set up.
Now, people move companies every 1-3 years and training consists of just a few hours a year on average. Turnover leads to vast amounts of knowledge having to constantly be re-learned. Instead of having someone who built the system stay and also be the one to maintain it, that person will leave and the new person needs to come in and figure it out from near scratch.
As an example, there was a software development lead who had been at a company for close to a decade. He wrote code for all the production systems. However, he then left. His replacement had only been there for a few months and did not work on any of the production systems. Historically, the lead would have trained his replacement. Now, the replacement often must train himself.
The nature of middle class work is changing. Millions of jobs used to involve repetitive, "by the rules", processing of papers or operation of equipment. Much of that work has been, or is in the process, of being be automated by computer systems or robots. Such jobs still exist but will tend to pay very poorly. If you want to make more than minimum wage you have to be capable of some task that robots and computers still do very poorly.
"Proven problem-solving ability" has become just another HR buzzword to put on wanted ads, like "Ninja", "Shark", "Rockstar" or, for the more technically inclined "Distributed", "Machine learning", "AI"... you get where I'm going with this, right?
As others have noted, problem-solving skills have been part of human nature, and animals too, since... ever, really.
Putting an emphasis on it, though, and requiring it to be proven (like a career in tech isn't proof enough that I can solve problems), is just a way, as a commenter on another answer pointed out, for companies to justify paying the "new guy" less: "Sure, you know how to solve problems, in a general, fuzzy, kind of way, that's why we hired you in the first place. But you don't know, yet, how to solve our problems, so, until you do, here, take those peanuts as pay and go back to your desk, code-monkey..."
Tongue in cheek answer - the company is fully aware that on it's own it will create problems.
Matthew Gaiser asnwer is exactly about that.
Company knows that their employees create, sometimes critical, tools for them. That some positions have bus factor of 1. That people have no time to create documentations and/or even think about backup plan, let alone create one.
If you see in job description "Young team" it could not only mean the people in those teams are young. It could also mean the team itself is young. So instead of working you solve a problem of "who the hell give access to that if I'm the one who's supposed to give acces to that".
Of course "problem solving" is an empthy phrase beause companies don't know what's the difference beetwen "reading code without documentations" and "IT wiped out the data with source"
