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Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore, most of the time. When I was younger I'd work 40 hours a week and

Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore, most of the time. When I was younger I'd work 40 hours a week and spend at least 40 more becoming expert. It paid off and got me to the Senior level. However, all the technology I was an expert at 20, 15, and even less than 10 years ago is useless. When hiring I usually looked for guys that were smart and could quickly learn new things or jacks of all trades. Now if trying to write new kernel drivers maybe I'd get a Kernel/C expert who values himself at 120k/year (probably contract so I could use him for a month or two). But, lets face it most of the time companies want to hire the 3 smart enough guys at 80k/year than 2 geniuses at one specific language or technology. At least that has been my experience, then again, I usually work at normal smaller/midsize and non tech large companies. I'm sure if you work at Google your experience would be very different. The point is I don't care about being the expert anymore as it requires a lot of my unpaid personal time. Then after investing my time for free I find the tech trending down and have to go back to the drawing board again.

dagw 11y ago
Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore Don't master the 'surface' technology, master the underlying concepts. For example, rather than trying to master this week's cool machine learning library, master the underlying mathematics and you'll not only be far ahead of most people who only mastered the library, but you'll happily be able to transfer your skills to the next machine learning library with minimal effort for the rest of your career.
maxxxxx 11y ago
I think the big picture hasn't changed that much over the last 20 years. Obviously the scale has changed but the fundamental challenges are pretty much the same. The only thing that has changed is the language/framework on top but the basics are still the same. It always surprises me how little really changes.
sklogic 11y ago
> Technology moves so fast I've heard this many times before, but have not seen any evidence yet. Mind listing the technologies that got really, totally obsolete?
- sophacles 11y ago
  I think an even better question is: Mind listing the technologies that are truly new? So often I see the next great thing hype turn out to be a reinvention of an existing concept, or a slight rearrangement of concepts that are positively ancient. Sometimes this includes an incremental improvement over the past. A lot of the velocity of "tech moves fast" is just backfilling tooling, features, concepts, and edge cases into the new language or framework.
- dsmithatx 11y ago
  Well 3 years ago I dealt with 12 data centers spread across the globe, 8000 bare metal servers. Many giant webfarms using RHEL with DB clustering. Having to deal with SAN's and NAS. Here I am now working entirely with the AWS infrastructure. First we shoved things in Puppet. Then we started shoving things in Git and using Ansible. Maybe development wise things don't seem that different but for an old ops guy like me having to go devops it is changing very fast. I never said that old technologies are obsolete but, jobs for supporting them fade and we must learn to survive in the new world.
rmah 11y ago
I used to think this 20 years go. I was also wrong. The state of the art of software development does NOT move fast, it moves glacially slowly. The fundamental technologies of 20 years ago are very similar to what is in use today. The tools are similar, the languages are similar, the frameworks and libraries are similar. Mostly, they have simply now more polished and have a few more features. A handful of things that were leading edge 20 years ago have gained popularity. These include things like object frameworks, event-oriented programming and the like. Some things that some call new are actually things that existed in the 80's that have just come back into fashion. Take asynchronous programming using callbacks (popular with javascript/node). We used these techniques in the late 80's quite extensively. There are a few things on the leading edge today that did not exist decades ago (or at least I wasn't aware of them). But these are far and few between. The basics though, those have not changed. What changes rapidly is tech fashion (for want of a better phrase). When I hire, I simply do not care if you know framework X or Y. Or even if you know language P, Q or R. What I care about is if you 1) truly understand the fundamentals and if you can 2) apply that knowledge to create high quality software.
- FullyFunctional 11y ago
  Exactly this. I have ~ 35 years of experience, but I'm always trying to keep up with advances in algorithms and data structures. Frameworks and languages is mostly just rearranging and renaming the deck chairs -- there's hardly anything _actually_ new. Taking a positive spin on it, if reintroducing good old concepts as new makes them more adopted, maybe that's a good thing. Most serious people will eventually recognize the precedence and make the link.

dagw 11y ago

Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore Don't master the 'surface' technology, master the underlying concepts. For example, rather than trying to master this week's cool machine learning library, master the underlying mathematics and you'll not only be far ahead of most people who only mastered the library, but you'll happily be able to transfer your skills to the next machine learning library with minimal effort for the rest of your career.

maxxxxx 11y ago

I think the big picture hasn't changed that much over the last 20 years. Obviously the scale has changed but the fundamental challenges are pretty much the same. The only thing that has changed is the language/framework on top but the basics are still the same. It always surprises me how little really changes.

sklogic 11y ago

> Technology moves so fast I've heard this many times before, but have not seen any evidence yet. Mind listing the technologies that got really, totally obsolete?

sophacles 11y ago
I think an even better question is: Mind listing the technologies that are truly new? So often I see the next great thing hype turn out to be a reinvention of an existing concept, or a slight rearrangement of concepts that are positively ancient. Sometimes this includes an incremental improvement over the past. A lot of the velocity of "tech moves fast" is just backfilling tooling, features, concepts, and edge cases into the new language or framework.
dsmithatx 11y ago
Well 3 years ago I dealt with 12 data centers spread across the globe, 8000 bare metal servers. Many giant webfarms using RHEL with DB clustering. Having to deal with SAN's and NAS. Here I am now working entirely with the AWS infrastructure. First we shoved things in Puppet. Then we started shoving things in Git and using Ansible. Maybe development wise things don't seem that different but for an old ops guy like me having to go devops it is changing very fast. I never said that old technologies are obsolete but, jobs for supporting them fade and we must learn to survive in the new world.

rmah 11y ago

I used to think this 20 years go. I was also wrong. The state of the art of software development does NOT move fast, it moves glacially slowly. The fundamental technologies of 20 years ago are very similar to what is in use today. The tools are similar, the languages are similar, the frameworks and libraries are similar. Mostly, they have simply now more polished and have a few more features. A handful of things that were leading edge 20 years ago have gained popularity. These include things like object frameworks, event-oriented programming and the like. Some things that some call new are actually things that existed in the 80's that have just come back into fashion. Take asynchronous programming using callbacks (popular with javascript/node). We used these techniques in the late 80's quite extensively. There are a few things on the leading edge today that did not exist decades ago (or at least I wasn't aware of them). But these are far and few between. The basics though, those have not changed. What changes rapidly is tech fashion (for want of a better phrase). When I hire, I simply do not care if you know framework X or Y. Or even if you know language P, Q or R. What I care about is if you 1) truly understand the fundamentals and if you can 2) apply that knowledge to create high quality software.

FullyFunctional 11y ago
Exactly this. I have ~ 35 years of experience, but I'm always trying to keep up with advances in algorithms and data structures. Frameworks and languages is mostly just rearranging and renaming the deck chairs -- there's hardly anything _actually_ new. Taking a positive spin on it, if reintroducing good old concepts as new makes them more adopted, maybe that's a good thing. Most serious people will eventually recognize the precedence and make the link.