You have to advance your career, acquiring skills, reputation, and status, as your skills depreciate. Budget time for "career maintenance", and consider the future when selecting a position.
The half-life of tech skills
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#12Learning a specific technology for a single project may have a short half-life. However, good coders aren't defined by tech knowledge, but by their deep understanding. If you can make great presentations in Powerpoint, everyone knows you'll still make good presentations in Google Slides.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#13>Consider the mathematics of futility: a company investing $2m in training its technical team today can expect half that knowledge to depreciate faster than a luxury car.
It's not like companies are molting their stacks every two years or something. If you are hired today, you skill and knowledge will evolve as the company evolves
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#14Do 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.
What is "half of what you learn"? Frankly, I think that people underrate the amount of learning that goes into even the smallest things in software development. I think about system utilities: bash/zsh, git, vim, tmux, make, ssh, rsync, docker, LSPs, grep -- all of these are useful and have been useful for a decade or more. C, C++, Java, Python -- all languages which have been useful and will continue to be useful; languages like Go and Rust are really exceptions, not the rule, and even when new ones come onto the scene, by and large languages stay the same more than they change. Things like threading and concurrency, how to manage mutexes. Or background information about the Linux kernel, how it works, how paging, processes, system-calls and the like work underneath the hood. Of course, architectural information is essential if you're doing anything performant, and the minimum time for things to change in that space is the 3 years hardware development cycle, and more practically 5 years or more. Even with GPUs: many things have changed, but practically if you learned CUDA 5 years ago you'd still be doing great today.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#15Learning a specific technology for a single project may have a short half-life. However, good coders aren't defined by tech knowledge, but by their deep understanding. If you can make great presentations in Powerpoint, everyone knows you'll still make good presentations in Google Slides.
Exactly. It's like the difference between thinking about tech proficiency in terms of "being good at C++" vs. being good at software engineering and being language agnostic.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#16Learning a specific technology for a single project may have a short half-life. However, good coders aren't defined by tech knowledge, but by their deep understanding. If you can make great presentations in Powerpoint, everyone knows you'll still make good presentations in Google Slides.
Not really, there are quite a few organizations that won't hire you unless you have 15 years experience in Google Slides exactly.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#17Do 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.
I started doing NLP in 2014. First, I was using SVM and feature vectors, then word embeddings, then handcrafted neural network models, then fine-tuning transformer encoders, then working with LLMs. In that time I worked with huge number of technologies, libraries, and algorithms. A hiring manager recently asked me what my experience with AI agents are, and I had to say that it's basically zero.
Okay, he was obviously very new to the field and had no idea, but it illustrates how the field progressed in the past 10 years, and a person who is just joining has very similar starting line to old-timers. The breadth of knowledge I have is of course extremely useful and I am able to get new concepts really fast, as there are many similarities. But the market in general does not care that much really.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#18tell this to a debian maintainer.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#19This is lacking a whole lot of nuance.
The things I've learned about the JVM in the 2000's are still mostly true, perhaps with a bit of tweaking.
The things I've learned about process, project management, some distilled concepts around refactoring, testing - all still very valuable and as true as when I learned them. Perhaps not the specific tools, but the concepts are valuable.
Learning C decades ago still has lots of value. Not to mention SQL - come on.
Learn that cool JS tech stack a few years back? Yeah, it's probably dead or radically changed. That integration with Company X? Same.
So clearly there's some distinction to be made here. People are still programming in FORTRAN in some niches. You can decide to invest in boring and stable approaches, or live on the bleeding edge relying on someone's weekend vibe code session.
"courtesy of Harvard Business Review" - there's your problem. Don't look to some MBAs to give you nuanced tech insight. The author of this article: "Harald Agterhuis" is just some recruiter. Of course he's got an incentive to push this BS.
My recommendation? Flag this low quality article.
Re: The half-life of tech skills
#20Do 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.
Mary Meeker apparently believes it, but she's made a career out of being confidently wrong about things.