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I was very surprised to read > 90%, of what I learn at one job is completely useless for the next one. That has not been my experience at all (and I've had so

I was very surprised to read > 90%, of what I learn at one job is completely useless for the next one. That has not been my experience at all (and I've had some pretty major job changes, including lawyer -> software developmer). If I had to put a number on it, I'd say more like 50% of what I've learned at each job is transferable. How about everyone else? Closer to 10% or 50%?

alex4864 6y ago
Likewise very surprised! I've found that Software Engineering as a field is great for knowledge transferring between jobs -- the ability to design and reason about systems transcends individual languages and tools. 50% sounds about right to me.
kemiller2002 6y ago
Almost everything I learn on the job is transferable. I use anything I pick up to build associations with how other things work. If someone is throwing away 90% of what is learned, something is wrong.
hycaria 6y ago
veterinary medicine to software development is around 10% too, maybe less.
jerf 6y ago
I think there's a point of view component. If you think of it is "Today I learned how to use $PROPRIETARY_AMAZON_TOOL to set up a new project which will use $PAT to deploy to a $PROPRIETARY_AMAZON_INTERNAL_CLOUD and sets everything up to $PA_MONITORING and $PA_ALERTING in my... etc. etc. etc., you get the idea, then yes, you will feel like what you "learned" is not transferrable. On the other hand, if you look at it like "Today I learned some best practices for setting up a new industrial-strength projects through the particular manifestation of this tool, learned about setting up monitoring through the particular manifestation of this other tool,", etc. etc., then even though you may have learned via particular local tools, you also learned a lot of stuff that may be useful later. The question is, let's say you did change jobs and had to learn some new set of tools. Will you learn them faster than you learned the first set of tools? Will you find a new perspective on the issues from learning the new set of tools? The answer should generally be yes. This is broadly speaking why I expect a 5-year veteran to pick things up faster than a fresh grad; OK, sure, you've never "used git", but I expect you've used source control somewhere. You may not "know React", but I expect you to have used something similar enough that you just have to learn React qua React and are not also learning about cookies and the basics of the DOM, etc. Pretty much the first professional thing I ever did was writing what we would today call a "static site generator" in a tool called Frontier, in its custom programming language, more or less from scratch. On the one hand, completely useless skill, Frontier has been dead for over a decade and was fairly zombie-ish for a good 5-8 years before that. On the other hand... the HTML basics I learned are still mostly good (I think it's fair to say at this point my frameset tricks & skills are not that useful anymore...), and the general skill of knowing how to write a static site generator is almost even low-level trendy right now, even though I would have to write it in some other language, of course. I dunno what the exact transfer number is. 90% seems high, certainly, but 10% way too low. There's only a small number of tools that are so bad that while working with them, you learn almost nothing about the problem space you are working in because the quirks of the tool completely dominate, and even then I'd submit a lot of it is still attitude.
zeroc8 6y ago
Not true for me at all. The underlying patterns of basically everything are quite valuable, so I'd say it's closer to 90%.
rikroots 6y ago
The skills I learned as a civil servant - policy development, communications, staff/resource management ... all the way down to document control and filing - have been super-useful and transferrable to both my professional and personal lives. The skills I developed as I fought, on a daily basis, with the AWS console - the sooner I lose those skills the happier I shall forever be.

alex4864 6y ago

Likewise very surprised! I've found that Software Engineering as a field is great for knowledge transferring between jobs -- the ability to design and reason about systems transcends individual languages and tools. 50% sounds about right to me.

kemiller2002 6y ago

Almost everything I learn on the job is transferable. I use anything I pick up to build associations with how other things work. If someone is throwing away 90% of what is learned, something is wrong.

hycaria 6y ago

veterinary medicine to software development is around 10% too, maybe less.

jerf 6y ago

I think there's a point of view component. If you think of it is "Today I learned how to use $PROPRIETARY_AMAZON_TOOL to set up a new project which will use $PAT to deploy to a $PROPRIETARY_AMAZON_INTERNAL_CLOUD and sets everything up to $PA_MONITORING and $PA_ALERTING in my... etc. etc. etc., you get the idea, then yes, you will feel like what you "learned" is not transferrable. On the other hand, if you look at it like "Today I learned some best practices for setting up a new industrial-strength projects through the particular manifestation of this tool, learned about setting up monitoring through the particular manifestation of this other tool,", etc. etc., then even though you may have learned via particular local tools, you also learned a lot of stuff that may be useful later. The question is, let's say you did change jobs and had to learn some new set of tools. Will you learn them faster than you learned the first set of tools? Will you find a new perspective on the issues from learning the new set of tools? The answer should generally be yes. This is broadly speaking why I expect a 5-year veteran to pick things up faster than a fresh grad; OK, sure, you've never "used git", but I expect you've used source control somewhere. You may not "know React", but I expect you to have used something similar enough that you just have to learn React qua React and are not also learning about cookies and the basics of the DOM, etc. Pretty much the first professional thing I ever did was writing what we would today call a "static site generator" in a tool called Frontier, in its custom programming language, more or less from scratch. On the one hand, completely useless skill, Frontier has been dead for over a decade and was fairly zombie-ish for a good 5-8 years before that. On the other hand... the HTML basics I learned are still mostly good (I think it's fair to say at this point my frameset tricks & skills are not that useful anymore...), and the general skill of knowing how to write a static site generator is almost even low-level trendy right now, even though I would have to write it in some other language, of course. I dunno what the exact transfer number is. 90% seems high, certainly, but 10% way too low. There's only a small number of tools that are so bad that while working with them, you learn almost nothing about the problem space you are working in because the quirks of the tool completely dominate, and even then I'd submit a lot of it is still attitude.

zeroc8 6y ago

Not true for me at all. The underlying patterns of basically everything are quite valuable, so I'd say it's closer to 90%.

rikroots 6y ago

The skills I learned as a civil servant - policy development, communications, staff/resource management ... all the way down to document control and filing - have been super-useful and transferrable to both my professional and personal lives. The skills I developed as I fought, on a daily basis, with the AWS console - the sooner I lose those skills the happier I shall forever be.