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Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

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Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#61

Post by sAuronas »

bsenftner wrote: post #55
jballanc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plan your exit into management, a related field, or some other job altogether. If you expect to be a coder at age 50 you're going to be disappointed. I'd like to simultaneously disagree and agree with you. If you were a 50 year old coder 10 years ago, then your only hope of remaining in the tech industry would be to add "Manager" to your job title. If you are a 50 year old coder today, that's still a sound directio…

I'm seeing a lot of mythic stereotypes here. I am a 52 year old full time coder, and have been actively developing since taking a college pascal class at age 11. > If you were a 50 year old coder 10 years ago, then your only hope of remaining in the tech industry would be to add "Manager" to your job title. People outside the startup bubble value delivering, regardless of age. Developers outside the startup bubble wo…

> start acting like a scientist.

I started late (38, 41 this year) and I couldn't imagine jumping from Ruby to Rust to whatever new hotness arrives when it's clear that there are handful of technologies that go deep (enough) and that are being used to solve problems that require someone to be more than a coder or even a dev.

I'm in the connected-car space and the only question I'm asking myself right now is: will my current skill set (mostly iOS in Swift/Obj-C/C) allow me to build for the future of augemented reality in vehicles or will going down the path of C++ -only- allow me to grow as a "software scientist" (perhaps a third way...)? Honestly I don't know, but I do know that I won't/can't find out if I jump into every HN rabbit holes that opens.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#62

Post by morbidhawk »

bsenftner wrote: post #55
jballanc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plan your exit into management, a related field, or some other job altogether. If you expect to be a coder at age 50 you're going to be disappointed. I'd like to simultaneously disagree and agree with you. If you were a 50 year old coder 10 years ago, then your only hope of remaining in the tech industry would be to add "Manager" to your job title. If you are a 50 year old coder today, that's still a sound directio…

I'm seeing a lot of mythic stereotypes here. I am a 52 year old full time coder, and have been actively developing since taking a college pascal class at age 11. > If you were a 50 year old coder 10 years ago, then your only hope of remaining in the tech industry would be to add "Manager" to your job title. People outside the startup bubble value delivering, regardless of age. Developers outside the startup bubble wo…

> I never start anything from scratch, as I have about a dozen application skeletons ready for various specific purposes, plus similar libraries I wrote, plus a knowledge of several large commercial SDKs, and developer experience in several major FOSS applications

I've had a project manager (very insightful guy) tell me something similar before. He said "as you get more experienced you'll (ideally) write less code and instead reuse code from libraries you've written in the past". I've always wondered how that works for someone? I'm assuming certain projects will have requirements where specific technologies would be used in the front-end and persistent layers depending on the kind of project you are building and so those wouldn't be as reusable but perhaps algorithms you've written before might be reusable on the computational side of things. Like perhaps if you had a library that handles very advanced moving cost calculations you could ideally use that same library in different software forms (mobile, web, desktop, command-line).

Edit: Git might be a good example of a library that can be reused a lot and used within many kinds of applications (IE: inside web app, within IDE, from command-line, desktop app, etc)

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#63

Post by itamarst »

cableshaft wrote: post #57
itamarst wrote: post #24

A lot of the technology on the bleeding edge will be gone in a couple of years. AngularJS v1 used to be the next big thing, now it's obsolete. Who knows if v2 will stick around. So following the latest technology in detail is unnecessary. Far more useful is just having a broad sense of what tools are available out there; it takes less time, and it's more useful since it gives you access to a broader set of tools on-d…

While Angular 1 might be 'obselete', there's still a lot of corporations out there with tons of Angular 1 code, and most of them are not going to be upgrading anytime soon. Angular 2 is enough of a paradigm shift that it would require rewriting those apps from scratch, pretty much, and there won't be a business need to do so for another 5+ years for a lot of these companies. We're still doing new apps in Angular 1 he…

The point is not that Angular 1 is bad somehow.

The point is that trying to keep up with all bleeding edge technology is a waste of time, because it's constantly being replaced.

While at the same time you need to learn whatever technology you use at work, which may not be the latest-and-greatest.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#64

Post by oblib »

Like pjc50, for the most part I don't. Last year was the exception.

I've been making web apps since 1998. Last year I learned how to use CouchDB and PouchDB. Before that I used a flat file database and the built-in filesystem to manage data. I used Perl on the backend with just a bit of JS on the front end to run the apps.

I never did learn how to use MySQL/PHP. I looked at it, decided it was a butt ugly way to make websites, and apps and admitted to myself that I wasn't qualified to design secure SQL apps and didn't want to learn because that is a career all by itself.

So I waited for something better to come along and last year CouchDB along with PouchDB hit the mark so I spent the year learning and using them. It was worth it. With those tools I am faster and better.

The years in-between were spent getting stuff done with the tools I was good at using, not trying to learn how to use a zillion other tools to do the same things.

I looked at a lot of newer tools again last year with an eye towards what was "best". There is a lot of cool stuff out there that does some really jazzy stuff, but in the end I decided to take another look at what was "easiest".

I ended up with CouchDB, PouchDB, and JQuery. Easy to learn and incredibly rich APIs with lots of support and example code. There's more than enough in those to learn and keep up with and if I need to add something I'll look for easy ways to do that too.

The truth is, it takes time to be productive with any language or tool or framework you use. It's a scatterbrained approach to try to build software with something new every time you start a new job.

Right now there are tools being built that will make "AI/VR" easier to implement. Wait for the tools.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#65

Post by oblib »

throwaway6845 wrote: post #5

It may not be in the spirit of HN, but deliberately being 3 years behind on the latest technologies is a really good way to stay employable without driving yourself mad keeping up with the latest and greatest. After 3 years, the flash-in-the-pans and the duds have been winnowed out and you can just concentrate on the stuff which will earn you paying gigs.

I agree with that. I don't think it's counter to the spirit of HN. I build apps for clients with the tools I know I'm proficient with but I play and hack a lot too. Sometimes that leads to use with client software though more often it doesn't, but learning is always good.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#66

Post by vjankov »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #25

Learn patterns and pop up the abstraction level. There are only a few patterns in programming: imperative, OO, functional, etc. Learn those. There are only a few abstraction levels in problem solving: meta, business, system, physical. Learn those. There are only a few types of patterns in ML and Big Data. Looks like it's time to learn those. But the principle is the same. Learn the patterns of various forms of soluti…

Do you mind expanding a little bit on the "few types of patterns in ML and Big Data". Do you mean models, pipelines etc or something different. I am studying ML in grad school and I'm seeing way more patterns than just a few, almost too many to be honest if by patterns you mean models. I'd love to hear your view and what you meant by only few types of patters.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#67

Post by rubicon33 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #25

Learn patterns and pop up the abstraction level. There are only a few patterns in programming: imperative, OO, functional, etc. Learn those. There are only a few abstraction levels in problem solving: meta, business, system, physical. Learn those. There are only a few types of patterns in ML and Big Data. Looks like it's time to learn those. But the principle is the same. Learn the patterns of various forms of soluti…

I've wrestled with this question virtually since the day I began coding professionally:

Should I become an expert at one language/domain, or, should I constantly learn new things and change roles?

I've done the latter, and I don't know yet if it will have been worth while. I worry about being a "jack of all trades, master of none". Yet, as you point out, a master of one trade had better hope it doesn't become obsolete in their life time.

So my hope is that the investment in learning, and adapting, will pay off in the long haul. I can write an iOS app, I can write an android app, I can code a backend server in scala + akka, or I can write a backend server in PHP. Can I do these things as well or as quickly as a master in each domain? Certainly not.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#68

Post by bsvalley »

I think you're mixing 2 things. First, what investors are investing in (AI/VR), then what kind of jobs will tech companies offer in a near future. I think the second one won't change, what will change will be the visions and missions of the future companies. There will still be software development for a while, even if you work for an "AI" company. These are just hot keywords in 2016/2017

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#69

Post by mbrodersen »

Don't until you need to. If you are planning to leave your current job then look at job offerings in the market and learn the tech needed to get one of those jobs. And since the technology underlying whatever tech is currently fashionable hasn't changed the last 50 years, it will be relatively easy to learn enough to get a job. The rest you learn on the job when solving specific problems. I would instead focus on learning the core tech that hasn't changed for 50+ years. Including functional programming, logic programming, how a computer fundamentally works (NAND gates) etc. What you learn from that will never become obsolete. You just need to translate what you learn into whatever the latest fashion framework/language call it and ignore the false hype.

Re: Ask HN: With such fast changes in technology, how do you update your skillset?

#70

Post by mbrodersen »

mbrodersen wrote: post #69

Don't until you need to. If you are planning to leave your current job then look at job offerings in the market and learn the tech needed to get one of those jobs. And since the technology underlying whatever tech is currently fashionable hasn't changed the last 50 years, it will be relatively easy to learn enough to get a job. The rest you learn on the job when solving specific problems. I would instead focus on lea…

For example: people who learned lisp years ago are now laughing about the hype higher level functions (lambdas etc.) are getting. It is ancient technology. Same when Java introduced garbage collection. Yet another ancient technology. However my argument is not that you should learn lisp today to get a job. You should learn it to understand the fundamental technologies that future fashionable frameworks/languages will use. Same goes for type theory. Rust is also using ancient technology (linear types) that you would already have known about long before Rust showed up if you learned type theory. The next step after Rush is of course dependent types.
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