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Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech)Here are 5 jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Here are 5 jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago.

NGL (Not gonna lie, try to keep up), the early 2010s were quite a crazy time to be alive. Believe it or not, iPhones didn’t come with four cameras. Memes used the font “impact”. And for a while there some of us believed that the world was going to end in 2012. (Ashton Kutcher, we’re looking at you.) Spoiler alert: It did not.

Of course, the jobs people worked in then? They were very different. Because of how fast technologies such as big data, cloud computing and even social media have sprouted, we enjoy career opportunities today that the early-2010s Singaporean could only dream of. Let’s have a look at some of them.


When I was growing up, there were no jobs such as drone pilots! Photo:Unsplash

Drone Pilot

Okay, we’re kinda cheating with the first one.

If you wanna be pedantic about it, the air force was already hiring for UAV pilots in 2011.

However, we’d argue that drone operators – particularly those who’d use drones for non-military purposes - were definitely not mainstream.

By now, you might have seen this meme – in just 10 years, both the cameraman and the helicopter pilot (assuming they only fly for filming purposes) were both made redundant.


Photo: Twitter

While you might have gotten used to the bird’s eye view that drones provide, it’s easy to forget that they’re only a recent invention. It was only in 2014 that drones were legalised in the United States for filming purposes. Singapore passed its very own Unmanned Aircraft Bill back in 2015.

Today in Singapore, drones are used from anything ranging from aerial photography to police surveillance, island maintenance and building inspections. Delivery folks are generally still safe from drones, but trials are ongoing.

Fun fact: The first iteration of DJI’s now ubiquitous and wildly popular Phantom drone appeared in 2013.

DevOps Engineer

‘DevSecOps’ might sound like an intimidating phrase, but if you break it down, it actually means Development, Security and Operations engineer. Less scary now, ain’t it? Put simply, the folk in DevOps (and DevSecOps) are tech generalists who do everything from software development, operations, and cybersecurity. Which if you think about it, is an extremely wide range of roles.

While DevOps seems like the natural thing to do, it wasn’t always this way. Not too long ago, the tech world practiced a ‘waterfall philosophy’, which also applied in the manufacturing and construction industries. The term ‘waterfall’ was used because the workflow was like this: Conception -> Initiation -> Analysis -> Design -> Construction -> Testing -> Deployment and maintenance

This is often known as a linear workflow model – which flows downwards, step by step. Hence the name ‘Waterfall’. However, as people would soon realise, just because something works well in some industries, doesn’t mean it would work well in others.

The waterfall approach simply wasn’t flexible enough for the fast-moving tech industry, where everything needed to be fluid. As a result, Agile philosophy was created, and DevOps Engineers were the people who could make this happen.

To put it simply, DevOps brings operations teams into development, so that continuous integration and delivery is possible – which is at the core of the Agile philosophy!

Full Stack Developer

Not too long ago, developers were split into two broad camps.

Front end vs back end.

You can think of front end development as the client side of the two, heavily involved with presentations. Indeed, front end web development involves converting data to a graphical interface, through the use of languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and/or other apps.

Back end developers, on the other hand, deal with the behind-the-scenes, every back end of a website involves a server, an application, and a database.

Of course, at some point over the last 10 years, the demands of the job started to increase, and the two camps started converging their skill sets to get what you call a ‘full stack developer.’

As you probably guessed, if developers were a meal, full stack developers are kinda like a five-star buffet – expecting to offer variety and versatility in their skill sets in both disciplines.

It’s little wonder why they’ve become one of the most sought after talents in recent history.

UI/UX Designer

Do you remember website design from 10 years ago? Here, let me jog your memory.


Photo: GovTech

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