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The half-life of tech skills

haraldagterhuis.substack.com

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#31
It seems to be relevant to hiring and startups, that is, if you hire people for particular tech skills, or build your startup around some specific area of expertise, half of these skills will be irrelevant in 2.5 years.

On a personal level, the fundamentals will be useful for your entire career, and the more you know, the faster you will be able to get the skill-du-jour. But the idea is that on your résumé, expect to change half of the lines in your "skills" section every 2.5 years, even if it takes you no more than a few hours to add these lines.

It also brushes aside tech in industries like defense, aviation, assembly lines, etc... where you have big, expensive machines, certifications, and projects that span decades. I wouldn't be surprised to find some Fortran code somewhere in the foundries that build the latest AI chips as EUV lithography literally took decades of R&D before it went to production.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#32

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 My knowledge gets outdated: APIs change, the top of the hour is a different one. Skills and especially abstract skills don’t get outdated as fast: Writing cuda kernels is surprisingly like the stuff we did in my first ever C class 25 years ago and I am still reading doc the same way my teacher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…

Does math fall into skills or knowledge? I think it falls into knowledge. Math never goes obsolete.

I think advanced math is a form of art.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#33
I started my career working with Apache, jquery, mysql, and php. Moved to Angular and Java. Then Go, k8s, postgres and a large etc. Back to php. Kotlin. Some python. Some serverless…

And that’s just the tangible stuff. Not to speak about DDD, TDD, clean code, cicd, debugging, and a large etc.

My skills don’t degrade. Each thing I have learned in the past helps me when learning the next hot thing. These “outdated” skills are an investment, not a waste; they are what makes me being a software engineer with X years of experience.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#34
post #16
post #12

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.

Not really, there are quite a few organizations that won't hire you unless you have 15 years experience in Google Slides exactly.

Good engineers can easily change “power point” for “google slides” as needed in their cvs.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#35
post #4
post #2

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.

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.

That’s like saying the workout you did 2 years ago or the food you ate 2 years ago are now worthless.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#36

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…

Does math fall into skills or knowledge? I think it falls into knowledge. Math never goes obsolete.

I think there are skill and knowledge components to math—skill at manipulating equations, knowledge of theorems and identities. These play into each other, of course.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#37

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…

Does math fall into skills or knowledge? I think it falls into knowledge. Math never goes obsolete.

It is similar to programming or software in that it involves both skills and knowledge. But the knowledge doe not quickly become obsolete. If you think about it, just about every activity involves both knowledge and skill. There are also different depths to knowledge. The knowledge required to be functional in a field may not be the same level of knowledge required to advance that field.

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#38

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…

Not all knowledge. Basic POSIX knowledge should serve you for a long time

Re: The half-life of tech skills

#39
post #35
post #4

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.

That’s like saying the workout you did 2 years ago or the food you ate 2 years ago are now worthless.

I think the ability to grok thru code bases and find patterns plateaus after like 5 years.
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