The Greatest Developer Fallacy Or The Wisest Words You’ll Ever Hear?

I'd also say that more projects fail because of problems with "soft skills" and project management than from anything else. When your marketing division has no idea at all of what can be produced at what time and how much it will cost, you're doomed.

At some shops I've seen, you'd think that the "software manager" is an endangered species. "Management" is selected by a caste system which excludes software people. I think there is a great need for specialists in software management, but many places won't hire them because they don't want to spend the $ and don't want to deal with an assertive software person.

In these lean times (the last 20 years), many companies aren't interested in hiring specialists but would rather hire junior people and take their chances. If you really do need a specialist, it often makes sense to bring in an outside consultant... If you've got some piece that fits in a box and will really stay inside that box.

As for developing your skills it's something you always ought to be doing. I think the HN crowd fetishizes learning exotic new languages -- that's fine, but that's not the way I prefer to do it. Lately I've found that my C#, PHP and Javascript are looking more and more like LISP. Lately I've read about algorithms used in genomics, parsing, and about description logics. On the other hand, I'm also learning salesmanship, getting a ham radio license, and mapping trails in the forests near me.

Part of developing new skils is reading books, getting certifications and stuff like that, but there's no substitute for "going where no man has gone before" and trying to build some of your own systems that push the state of the art... Do that, and pretty soon you'll find there aren't any books or papers about what you're working on.

Wise words spoken by the foolish are foolish.

It's wise to learn by doing things that interest you and picking up the required skills as you go. It may be wise to avoid wasting time learning things you haven't encountered a need for that are on somebody's list of "stuff you should know" since there's legitimate disagreement over what people should know, and you only have one lifetime. A potential problem is that you may not know what it is you're missing until you learn it. A lot of CS fundamentals are like that; I recently saw somebody invent association lists in C# because he didn't know what a hashtable was. Just in time learning is a useful idea, but dangerous. Use it, but not to the exclusion of all other methods of deciding what to learn, and be careful with it.

Nothing can take the place of simple enthusiasm and curiosity. If you're in tech because you like building systems, programming, security, or what have you -- chances are you work on your own projects at work or on your own time that help you learn. The idea is that you become good at what you do instead of becoming the most knowledgeable person about one specific thing.

Emphatically, huh? I guess it's not so obvious to me. Talk to an intelligent, clearheaded old person, and you may discover that they are experts in a thing or two.