21–30 of 39 posts
Learning 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.
Do 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…
Learning 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.
I am not sure about that example. A lot of people learn to use a specific piece of software and memorise how to do stuff and are therefore confused by the slightest difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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; l…
Very little about Go is entirely novel. It’s a newer descendant of C with some additions and excisions but mostly similar syntax. The language is newer, but the way you use it isn’t that new. Java is about equivalent to C++. PHP and Ruby were inspired by Perl and took things in different directions, while Perl itself was an amalgamation of C, BasicPlus, Lisp, shell, and the common shell tools like sed, awk, and tr. From Ruby comes Crystal. From PHP comes Hack.
tmux isn’t entirely different from screen.
git works differently, but on the surface isn’t drastically different from Subversion.
ssh is basically rsh with encryption.
Zsh and Bash are basically in the Bourne / Korn family trees of shells.
Docker has a nicer CLI interface, but a lot of the same concepts as LXC, LXD, jails, and more. Podman inherited a lot from Docker.
make, cmake, imake, Ant, SCons, and other build systems cover the same tasks with different syntax.
GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins all cover CI/CD differently, but how to build a reliable pipeline is a skill that transfers to new syntax and configuration file names.
Learning 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.
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.
Of course if all the career maintenance happens on paid company time, then I see no problem. But unfortunately for SWE's at least that's often not the case.
Even so, there are specific skills you can learn that are older than most people and will continue to be relevant, like SQL, vi, the terminal.
I 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 tha…