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The diminishing half-life of knowledge

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Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#61

Post by dartos »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #59
jandrewrogers wrote: post #54

It is important to recognize that even if knowledge becomes untrue because some assumption or fundamental has changed, knowing the history of these changes and why they occurred is still extraordinarily valuable knowledge. Too many software developers just know the "current thing" without knowing why it is the current thing and the specific issues that caused us to move on from the old thing. This ignorance of the pa…

> It is important to recognize that even if knowledge becomes untrue because some assumption or fundamental has changed, knowing the history of these changes and why they occurred is still extraordinarily valuable knowledge. [...] I think this sense of history is one of the most important aspects of "experience" when hiring. I can tell you that in my experience employers do not value this kind of knowledge a lot. Qui…

While you’re not wrong, just bc employers don’t care about it during interviews doesn’t mean it’s not important.

In my experience, startups with inexperienced technical leadership tend to be the “next big thing” (as far as tech stacks go) focused types of places.

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#62

Post by aleph_minus_one »

smitty1e wrote: post #33
joshuaissac wrote: post #26

The article references the following IEEE Spectrum article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/an-engineering-career-only-a-young... > Given a choice, many employers would rather hire a couple of inexperienced computer programmer and spend a few months training them than hiring (or retaining) a more experienced but expensive programmer. In the very next paragraph: > In addition, many employers aren’t interested in providing t…

There is some "loyal autodidact" unicorn who would be an ideal hire. People tend to fall somewhere on a robot/ninja spectrum. The observation that employers have multiple motives that are in tension is simply human.

> There is some "loyal autodidact" unicorn who would be an ideal hire.

Let us understand "loyal" as "not very willing to switch jobs" (and not in the sense of "submissive"/"obedient").

(Loyal) autodidacts are still a nuisance to many bosses, because autodidacts, nearly by definition, often have a very strong tendency to "think autonomously". Thus they have a tendency to question a lot of (technological, architectural, ...) decisions - often for good reasons (and if they are experienced autodidacts they often also the background knowledge to support their reasoning). In other words: autodidacts are commonly less ingrained in "the way things are usually done", which can easily lead to conflicts with bosses "who love to boss around".

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#63

Post by JohnFen »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #54

It is important to recognize that even if knowledge becomes untrue because some assumption or fundamental has changed, knowing the history of these changes and why they occurred is still extraordinarily valuable knowledge. Too many software developers just know the "current thing" without knowing why it is the current thing and the specific issues that caused us to move on from the old thing. This ignorance of the pa…

This is one of my pet issues. I'm absolutely of the opinion that you need to at least be familiar and understand what has come before in a technical field in order to have real mastery in the same field today.

Practically speaking, knowing the hows and whys of obsolete technologies makes it much easier to learn new the new stuff that is coming tomorrow as well. Everything is built on what has come before.

I see many "kids these days" who not only don't know the history, but actively think that knowing it is a waste of their time. It's a shame, because that attitude is a handicap. I also take it as an indication that the person doesn't have an interest in the field for its own sake.

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#64

Post by JohnFen »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #59
jandrewrogers wrote: post #54

It is important to recognize that even if knowledge becomes untrue because some assumption or fundamental has changed, knowing the history of these changes and why they occurred is still extraordinarily valuable knowledge. Too many software developers just know the "current thing" without knowing why it is the current thing and the specific issues that caused us to move on from the old thing. This ignorance of the pa…

> It is important to recognize that even if knowledge becomes untrue because some assumption or fundamental has changed, knowing the history of these changes and why they occurred is still extraordinarily valuable knowledge. [...] I think this sense of history is one of the most important aspects of "experience" when hiring. I can tell you that in my experience employers do not value this kind of knowledge a lot. Qui…

In a sense, though, that doesn't matter. I mean, it would be nice, but it's not material. That knowledge is of value to the devs directly because it makes them better devs. That is something employers do actually value.

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#65

Post by joshuanapoli »

roenxi wrote: post #28

As a counterpoint, it is impossible to discuss this topic without coming to some definition of "mastering" a tech stack. The concept itself seems suspicious. That is like saying "I mastered fashion". What, exactly, does it mean to master something that is in constant flux? How do we differentiate between a master and someone who read the documentation a few weeks ago? It is a mug's game trying to master a tech stack…

Beyond some point, mastering "fundamentals" tends to look a bit like a barbershop pole. Engineering and computer science principles are in competition with each other. Within each tech stack, the balance of forces is different. It takes years of experience within a particular tech stack for an organization to find elegant and harmonious balance in techniques.

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#66

Post by zelphirkalt »

jacquesm wrote: post #49

It's not so much the knowledge itself that has a half-life (unless it is front-end tech knowledge), but the ability to monetize knowledge. You used to be able to make a career out of some niche bit of knowledge but those days are over. You need to work hard just to stay current, in almost every field and that is as much a trend driven by technology as it is driven by the fact that there are so many people of working…

This is why it is important to gain very good knowledge about the basics and "axioms" of whatever one works with. That way one can very quickly grasp "new" things, once it is needed. Without a solid grasp on the basics, one is bound to keep chasing the hype.

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#67

Post by [deleted] »

jdewerd wrote: post #44
sshine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context: both of these YouTubers were eventually denied stay in China and turned their channel into bashing China full time for a living. I really valued their insight and perspective (rural China by motorcycle, for example, is not a common perspective in the west), but eventually had to unsubscribe from their toxic bitterness.

Yeah, it's a shame they've been audience captured. At the beginning they leaned a bit to the rosy side, clearly glossing over visible negatives. Somewhere around when they left and were able to speak about good and bad but hadn't committed to a narrative was probably the point of peak value. Now they are almost comically anti-china. Ah well.

[deleted]

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#68

Post by fluoridation »

7thaccount wrote: post #42
marcosdumay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One really important issue with your first point is that everybody hiring is filtering by experience in SaaS, framework, and as a last resort, language. Nobody is searching for knowledge of the fundamentals. But anyway, my take is that the problem the article is describing is caused by the existence of way too many fundamentals that can't all be practiced.

Both your comment and the parent you're replying to are awesome and match my experience in my area of electrical engineering (includes a lot of software, programming, database needs as well, so fairly relevant). There are those that have resumes tailored to a single particular thing that if hot right now, will have 1000 recruiters after them to run certain grid studies. I'm more of a fundamentalist (need to think of…

>I'm more of a fundamentalist (need to think of a better term)

"I tend to focus more on the fundamentals".

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#69

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #54

It is important to recognize that even if knowledge becomes untrue because some assumption or fundamental has changed, knowing the history of these changes and why they occurred is still extraordinarily valuable knowledge. Too many software developers just know the "current thing" without knowing why it is the current thing and the specific issues that caused us to move on from the old thing. This ignorance of the pa…

> Too many software developers just know the "current thing" without knowing why it is the current thing and the specific issues that caused us to move on from the old thing. This ignorance of the past frequently encourages developers to reinvent an old thing poorly without understanding that not only is it not new but that we stopped doing it in many contexts for good and nuanced reasons.

I agree with this, but I also have real frustration that so often, as an industry, I see big pendulum swings along the lines of "that old thing is bad, let's do this new thing that solves many of the problems of the old thing." Except that engineering is usually about balancing tradeoffs, and oftentimes that new thing leaves you with a different set of problems that the old thing fixed in response to the old-older thing.

Microservices were probably my best example of this, where companies were frustrated by the issues with monoliths so they said "Aha, microservices solve all those monolith problems", except microservices come with a whole slew of difficulties of their own, which in my opinion are often more difficult to manage than the problems with monoliths.

The industry's love for a hot minute when all these NoSql DBs first came out (i.e. around when Mongo came out), only to later find out "Hey, the ACID guarantees in RDBMS transactions are actually pretty essential a lot of the time" is another good example.

One bright spot is that I feel like the industry has matured somewhat when it comes to searching for these silver bullets. All frameworks and tech have pros and cons, and when you solve one problem, don't be unaware of the new problems that will create. E.g. sometimes you still see some "Do it all in the cloud!!" vs. "No, you lose control when you do it in the cloud, you should own it all", but I think more commonly you see reasoned responses along the lines of "it depends".

Re: The diminishing half-life of knowledge

#70

Post by barrysteve »

When reading and writing was new, there was a real problem of authors becoming reactive and narrowing their writing to a reaction of what they read.

The same concept can happen with coders. They don't have an understanding and purpose for code outside of the computer, and they code reactively. Therefore it is easy for them to forget.

It is also worth noting that the culture and electronic lesuire has become very mentally consuming (if you allow it to be). It is possible to use electronic media so much that you forget code.

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