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I didn’t really find anything I felt like specializing in for the first decade-ish of my career. I was working on games, I don’t think 3D math is that cool, and

by ragona 6y ago

I didn’t really find anything I felt like specializing in for the first decade-ish of my career. I was working on games, I don’t think 3D math is that cool, and I wasn’t excited. I was tired of coding games over and over. I don’t think I was an expert beginner but I wasn’t an expert in anything I wanted to continue doing. I took a break to be a manager for a while, which turned out to both be an incredible learning experience AND enough pressure relieved from the daily code grind that I was able to rekindle my passion for code. Started writing a lot outside of work, realized I really like cryptography, studied that, became competent enough to even figure out what TYPE of beginner I want to be, etc. it’s very satisfying. I’m around four years into that journey now, I’ve returned to a coding path where I get to actually learn while building, and I’m excited. The expert beginner is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into. I also think we do this TO people when we trap them in a role and give them very little flexibility in execution. They will begin to specialize in doing a bad thing well without understanding what they’re doing, especially if they aren’t given mentorship.

redisman 6y ago
It's easy to fall into since it's usually what's expected day-to-day. Not that many people have a chance to dive really deep into a topic at most companies. Usually you're churning out fairly similar stuff for most of your tickets. It's also dangerous for your career if you pick your specialization wrong. Maybe 5 or 10 years later that technology is obsolete. Earlier in my career I was something of a (Adobe) Flash expert but there's no way I would even mention that these days. Much of it translates to other technologies but not in a way that makes me an expert in them.
- ragona 6y ago
  YO, same, I bet we hung out on Kirupa at the same time haha. I worked on flash games at Disney, PopCap, Sony and Amazon. That was the shit for a while for 2D games. But I actually went from social to mobile to PC games and found myself less and less interested. Don’t get me wrong it’s very cool code and quaternions solve a lot of the pain so some of the math is frankly less fiddly than 2D, but I wasn’t in love. It’s been nice to fully pivot towards cryptography and security since I get to work on a lot more projects and do a better job on them. No one cares about bugs in games. Everyone cares about bugs in crypto. It’s nicer for the engineers. Plus it’s frankly so deep that I have very little risk of mistaking myself for an expert. Even PhD’s only have a narrow specialty, it’s very comforting how hard it is.

by ragona 6y ago

redisman 6y ago

It's easy to fall into since it's usually what's expected day-to-day. Not that many people have a chance to dive really deep into a topic at most companies. Usually you're churning out fairly similar stuff for most of your tickets. It's also dangerous for your career if you pick your specialization wrong. Maybe 5 or 10 years later that technology is obsolete. Earlier in my career I was something of a (Adobe) Flash expert but there's no way I would even mention that these days. Much of it translates to other technologies but not in a way that makes me an expert in them.

ragona 6y ago
YO, same, I bet we hung out on Kirupa at the same time haha. I worked on flash games at Disney, PopCap, Sony and Amazon. That was the shit for a while for 2D games. But I actually went from social to mobile to PC games and found myself less and less interested. Don’t get me wrong it’s very cool code and quaternions solve a lot of the pain so some of the math is frankly less fiddly than 2D, but I wasn’t in love. It’s been nice to fully pivot towards cryptography and security since I get to work on a lot more projects and do a better job on them. No one cares about bugs in games. Everyone cares about bugs in crypto. It’s nicer for the engineers. Plus it’s frankly so deep that I have very little risk of mistaking myself for an expert. Even PhD’s only have a narrow specialty, it’s very comforting how hard it is.