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Foundational knowledge does not decay. True in a certain intellectual sense. And in practical senses, also. But unfortunately, the hiring market doesn't filt
by 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 agoAre 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 agoSure, if you like 3-month contracts.
- clifanatic 10y agoIn a different state than the one you live in. No relocation assistance.
- kafkaesq 10y agoI 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).