The half-life of tech skills
haraldagterhuis.substack.com
The half-life of tech skills
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#2Do people really believe that knowledge from more than 30 months ago has no value? Even the people doing keyword searches on resumes are smarter than that.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#3That some skills decay in value as time goes on is very old concept and already has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
Beyond that, the essay is a rambling mishmash of ideas and unsourced assertions with no real point to it.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#4Do people really believe that knowledge from more than 30 months ago has no value? Even the people doing keyword searches on resumes are smarter than that.
Easily half of the crap I learn from over 2 yrs ago is completely worthless. Mental models of code bases that I no longer work on as one example.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#5Do people really believe that knowledge from more than 30 months ago has no value? Even the people doing keyword searches on resumes are smarter than that.
Yes. Memorizing how a framework works is not knowledge. Knowledge is the deep understanding thing LLMs can't do.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#6Do people really believe that knowledge from more than 30 months ago has no value? Even the people doing keyword searches on resumes are smarter than that.
They are talking about the half-life, so it should never become valueless, just drop exponentially.
Also, skills and knowledge are different things, right? I’d believe that half the skills picked up in a fast-growing field are obsolete after a couple years.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#7Do people really believe that knowledge from more than 30 months ago has no value? Even the people doing keyword searches on resumes are smarter than that.
The article compares its value to that a Nokia flip phone. Nokia flip phones, while not as valuable as an iPhone, aren't worthless. They can still fetch something on the open market.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#8I think he is confusing knowledge with skill.
My knowledge gets outdated: APIs change, the top of the hour is a different one.
Skills and especially abstract skills don’t get outdated as fast: Writing cuda kernels is surprisingly like the stuff we did in my first ever C class 25 years ago and I am still reading doc the same way my teacher taught me in 7th grade.
The more you look the more things are the same. All that is done was done and has been done before; there is nothing new under the sun.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#9Do people really believe that knowledge from more than 30 months ago has no value? Even the people doing keyword searches on resumes are smarter than that.
The Lindy effect can be a useful heuristic. Something invented 30 months probably has less long-term value something that was invented 10 years ago and is being used.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#10[deleted]