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This statement is false > Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years. and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much

This statement is false > Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years. and the rest of the article seems to be based on it so it negates much of what is said. Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works never gets old. Knowing how to set up an allocation problem as a mixed-integer program never gets old. In short, there are many things that never get old. What does get old is the latest fad and trend. So ignore the fads and trends and learn the fundamentals.

glandium 10y ago
How exactly are you contradicting that sentence you're quoting? In fact, it seems to me you're confirming it. He didn't say that everything a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years, but that half will. You're only enumerating the half that won't.
- micahbright 10y ago
  This doesn't directly to the statement you're refuting, but he explicitly mentioned half-life. The author does basically ignore the core knowledge aspects of a programmers career, and he bases his entire argument on the half-life of usefulness of detailed knowledge about specific technologies.
- combatentropy 10y ago
  I agree with the grandparent, that the writer overstated how much in ten years will be useless. It was almost 20 years ago that I first learned HTML, and since then neither it nor hardly anything else I have learned has decayed: CSS, native JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Bash. But I guess it depends on what you try learning.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    Things you have learned, but decayed: IE6 CSS fixes, Apache1 configuration file syntaxes, PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates, Jquery, ...
    - combatentropy 10y ago
      > IE6 CSS fixes I didn't really ever learn these. I stuck to simple layouts or used tables, which is fine (https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table). > Apache1 configuration file syntaxes I didn't learn Apache until version 2. > PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates I never learned these. I don't know what they are. > Jquery This hasn't decayed.
skybrian 10y ago
I think you're talking about the other half (which isn't useless).
kafkaesq 10y ago
Foundational knowledge does not decay. True in a certain intellectual sense. And in practical senses, also. But unfortunately, the hiring market doesn't filter for "foundational knowledge"; in realistic terms, it largely hires for what might best be termed "keyword compliance" -- that is, baseline exposure to stuff that barely existed, or if it did, barely ticked most people's radar screens more than 5 years ago. And sometimes with even greatly shorter cutoffs than that. You know, stuff like Docker, React, Spark, etc. That is, everyone says they're not out to hire dummies. But if you look at a lot of job ads -- a lot of people apparently just won't talk to you if you don't have a good number of "boxes" checked. Corresponding, in many cases, to stuff that wasn't even around 4 or more years ago. Very few (or so it appears) seem genuinely interested in hiring generalists with "strong foundational knowledge". I know there are many counterexamples. But if you go by the stated proclamations companies make about who should bother sending a resume -- for a lot of them, it's not foundational knowledge that gets you to a screening call -- it's keyword soup.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  Are you saying that there aren't any jobs using long-term established stable ecosystems in the hiring market? No J2EE CRUD apps, no standard LAMP websites, no .NET stack-based jobs?
  - bitwize 10y ago
    Sure, if you like 3-month contracts.
    - clifanatic 10y ago
      In a different state than the one you live in. No relocation assistance.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    I wouldn't say there aren't "any" such jobs. And there are a lot of languages I never look at ads for, so I can't say I have any sense of what their market is like. And of course there are whole domains (like C++) where the ecosystem is just intrinsically older. But by and large (and this gets back to the original article), once your core "keyword set" has gotten long enough in the tooth (which I'm pegging at an age of 5 year or so), the number of ballpark-open offerings (as in: you have enough XYZ that they're consider talking to you) does seem to drop quite precipitously. And the more "skinny pants" your domain is (like web stuff), the more this rule seems to hold. So the JS ecosystem would seem to be a bellweather example -- nearly every role seems to require either AngularJS or React (5 and 3 years out, respectively), or something similarly recent; pretty much no one is interested in jQuery or any of the older frameworks, these days (except, as the other commenter stated, for small maintenance projects).
RandomOpinion 10y ago
While I agree with the rest, there is one nit I must pick regarding: >This statement is false: "Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years." The idea of a half-life of working knowledge has been around for decades; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
clifanatic 10y ago
> Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works never gets old. Knowing how to set up an allocation problem as a mixed-integer program never gets old. Tell that to all the people hiring programmers, they seem to be unclear.

glandium 10y ago

How exactly are you contradicting that sentence you're quoting? In fact, it seems to me you're confirming it. He didn't say that everything a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years, but that half will. You're only enumerating the half that won't.

micahbright 10y ago
This doesn't directly to the statement you're refuting, but he explicitly mentioned half-life. The author does basically ignore the core knowledge aspects of a programmers career, and he bases his entire argument on the half-life of usefulness of detailed knowledge about specific technologies.
combatentropy 10y ago
I agree with the grandparent, that the writer overstated how much in ten years will be useless. It was almost 20 years ago that I first learned HTML, and since then neither it nor hardly anything else I have learned has decayed: CSS, native JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Bash. But I guess it depends on what you try learning.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  Things you have learned, but decayed: IE6 CSS fixes, Apache1 configuration file syntaxes, PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates, Jquery, ...
  - combatentropy 10y ago
    > IE6 CSS fixes I didn't really ever learn these. I stuck to simple layouts or used tables, which is fine (https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table https://www.combatentropy.com/coming_back_to_the_table). > Apache1 configuration file syntaxes I didn't learn Apache until version 2. > PostgreSQl getOrCreate surrogates I never learned these. I don't know what they are. > Jquery This hasn't decayed.

skybrian 10y ago

I think you're talking about the other half (which isn't useless).

kafkaesq 10y ago

Foundational knowledge does not decay. True in a certain intellectual sense. And in practical senses, also. But unfortunately, the hiring market doesn't filter for "foundational knowledge"; in realistic terms, it largely hires for what might best be termed "keyword compliance" -- that is, baseline exposure to stuff that barely existed, or if it did, barely ticked most people's radar screens more than 5 years ago. And sometimes with even greatly shorter cutoffs than that. You know, stuff like Docker, React, Spark, etc. That is, everyone says they're not out to hire dummies. But if you look at a lot of job ads -- a lot of people apparently just won't talk to you if you don't have a good number of "boxes" checked. Corresponding, in many cases, to stuff that wasn't even around 4 or more years ago. Very few (or so it appears) seem genuinely interested in hiring generalists with "strong foundational knowledge". I know there are many counterexamples. But if you go by the stated proclamations companies make about who should bother sending a resume -- for a lot of them, it's not foundational knowledge that gets you to a screening call -- it's keyword soup.

jimmaswell 10y ago
Are you saying that there aren't any jobs using long-term established stable ecosystems in the hiring market? No J2EE CRUD apps, no standard LAMP websites, no .NET stack-based jobs?
- bitwize 10y ago
  Sure, if you like 3-month contracts.
  - clifanatic 10y ago
    In a different state than the one you live in. No relocation assistance.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  I wouldn't say there aren't "any" such jobs. And there are a lot of languages I never look at ads for, so I can't say I have any sense of what their market is like. And of course there are whole domains (like C++) where the ecosystem is just intrinsically older. But by and large (and this gets back to the original article), once your core "keyword set" has gotten long enough in the tooth (which I'm pegging at an age of 5 year or so), the number of ballpark-open offerings (as in: you have enough XYZ that they're consider talking to you) does seem to drop quite precipitously. And the more "skinny pants" your domain is (like web stuff), the more this rule seems to hold. So the JS ecosystem would seem to be a bellweather example -- nearly every role seems to require either AngularJS or React (5 and 3 years out, respectively), or something similarly recent; pretty much no one is interested in jQuery or any of the older frameworks, these days (except, as the other commenter stated, for small maintenance projects).

RandomOpinion 10y ago

While I agree with the rest, there is one nit I must pick regarding: >This statement is false: "Half of what a programmer knows will be useless in 10 years." The idea of a half-life of working knowledge has been around for decades; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

clifanatic 10y ago

> Foundational knowledge does not decay. Knowing how to estimate the scalability of a given design never gets old. Knowing fundamental concurrency concepts never gets old. Knowing the fundamentals of logic programming and how backtracking works never gets old. Knowing how to set up an allocation problem as a mixed-integer program never gets old. Tell that to all the people hiring programmers, they seem to be unclear.