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I found this article difficult since "personal moat" is used as a target rather than as the side effect of a behavior. My experience here is limited of course

I found this article difficult since "personal moat" is used as a target rather than as the side effect of a behavior. My experience here is limited of course to engineers and academics, generally technical people I've known over the years as they have grown professionally. The ones who have "moats" are the same people whose career choices have been deliberate rather than opportunistic. When I meet people who are deliberate in the direction they are going[1], they invest more in the direction. So if someone is looking to become a great manager they seek out companies with good managers and try to learn from them. As I interviewed people at Google, when I asked "Why Google?" and they responded "I've always wanted to work at Google." I would follow up with, "Okay, but why?" There were two general kinds of answers here, one was "because Google right?" and the other was "Google is investing in X which is something I'm interested in and I believe I can help with that." Opportunistic vs deliberate. The people I've known that got really stuck were ones who found themselves in a "really sweet gig" which was not to hard, paid well, and over time it became harder to find people who could do it. One engineer I know spent 25 years being "the Fax guy." He knew more about FAX, the history, the protocols, the problems in implementing it, etc than I will ever know. But it wasn't about how FAX worked, it was about knowing what people paid other people to work on when it came to FAX. And then FAX became a non-thing and he had no skills that any number of new college grads had. What he could have done was learn about digital signal processing and how you process signals to extract data in noisy environments. That has pretty universal application, but he wasn't working on FAX stuff because he liked FAX, or because he found the technology behind it interesting. It was just "in demand", until it wasn't. So he had a great "personal moat" but he was also barrelling along toward being obsolete. As a result I am not sure I can take the article too literally. Becoming a specialist is one thing, but there is risk that the specialization will become moot. You're moat doesn't do you any good if nobody needs your specialty. [1] Which does not imply that they have tunnel vision with respect to other paths, just that they have an internal stack of values and reasoning that guides them in a particular direction.

kshacker 6y ago
Oh there are so many of us with those FAX personal moats. You work on something, a framework, a data interchange thingy that only you know, and over time others keep moving but you become the one indispensable guy ... until one day you are not.
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  It's interesting that this seems to be much worse in software than in hardware. This is one reason (among many, including personal reasons) why I've focused my career on hardware rather than software. JavaScript might (or might not) reign for a hundred years, but transistors are forever.
- toast0 6y ago
  Also, things like you train people up on your job, but there's not really enough work for two FAX people, so they go off and do something else (and, usually, forget all the FAX nonsense). And, your moat is fixing all the weird things, actually. And there's a lot of weird things, but the same one doesn't keep break, so how do you train someone to just fix whatever is broken that is nobody's job? You have to hire someone with that mindset, and just give them some tickets and a little bit of help here and there.
taneq 6y ago
Even if your specialization continues to be valuable, it's still something that can easily and insidiously turn from a moat to a pidgeon-hole to a set of golden handcuffs. I think the distinction comes in how portable your specialization is, ie. "I'm really good at rapid prototyping" vs. your example of "I know everything there is to know about FAX". If anything, I'd be cautious of building a personal moat based on knowledge, because it's too easy for that to become a trap where you can't be replaced but you also have nowhere to grow.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  unless the thing you know everything about - like say FAX - is something that keeps expanding all the time, then once you know everything about it you should be able to structure your time to learn a fallback you can switch to if the necessity arises, which is basically what I did when my specialty was no longer in great demand.
  - peteypao 6y ago
    I'm curious... tell me more about this. What specialty did you have? What did you switch to?
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      Well I was pretty good at XSL-T and XML related technologies, so that was at one point a good thing to be in to, at the time I leveraged that into doing standardization work on the Danish OIOXML project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML where I wrote the schemas for the first versions of the Danish efaktura project (efaktura is format for invoices based on UBL that was required by law for all governmental invoicing) and did a bit of other standardization work. Now at this point if I wasn't such an artistic punk type I would have gone off to private industry and worked in banking etc. as the Danish OIOXML / Efaktura specialist doing consulting work for a few years at a few hundred dollars an hour, instead I got enticed by a friend to go work at a company that I hated for the next couple years because we were going to build a media management product we had tried to do a few years before but this time to do it right! After which there wasn't such a big oioxml efaktura thing anymore but I did still have XSL-T so I did that for several years at Thomson Reuters and then when downsized from there nobody used XSL-T anymore but I had during these years developed my backup search technologies and frontend skills. The last 5 years I've been mainly frontend with some 3-4 months every few years doing search stuff.
DonHopkins 6y ago
I remember when it seemed like a PostScript Email to FAX gateway was going to be a revolutionary way of ordering pizza! Then I got in trouble for accidentally revealing Sun’s secret multimedia “Email-to-Pizza” strategy to the internet. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... It turned out that fax machines have a horrible time transmitting graphics with halftone gray scale patterns: https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.pn... >As it turns out, it takes a hell of a long time to fax a picture of a PostScript pizza, because the PostScript halftone scales and jaggies turn on and off and on and off so quickly and unpredictably that it’s extremely inefficient for the fax algorithms to compress, and very susceptible to line noise. Fax was just not designed for that kind of computer generated imagery!
deleted 6y ago
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kshacker 6y ago

Oh there are so many of us with those FAX personal moats. You work on something, a framework, a data interchange thingy that only you know, and over time others keep moving but you become the one indispensable guy ... until one day you are not.

exmadscientist 6y ago
It's interesting that this seems to be much worse in software than in hardware. This is one reason (among many, including personal reasons) why I've focused my career on hardware rather than software. JavaScript might (or might not) reign for a hundred years, but transistors are forever.
toast0 6y ago
Also, things like you train people up on your job, but there's not really enough work for two FAX people, so they go off and do something else (and, usually, forget all the FAX nonsense). And, your moat is fixing all the weird things, actually. And there's a lot of weird things, but the same one doesn't keep break, so how do you train someone to just fix whatever is broken that is nobody's job? You have to hire someone with that mindset, and just give them some tickets and a little bit of help here and there.

taneq 6y ago

Even if your specialization continues to be valuable, it's still something that can easily and insidiously turn from a moat to a pidgeon-hole to a set of golden handcuffs. I think the distinction comes in how portable your specialization is, ie. "I'm really good at rapid prototyping" vs. your example of "I know everything there is to know about FAX". If anything, I'd be cautious of building a personal moat based on knowledge, because it's too easy for that to become a trap where you can't be replaced but you also have nowhere to grow.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
unless the thing you know everything about - like say FAX - is something that keeps expanding all the time, then once you know everything about it you should be able to structure your time to learn a fallback you can switch to if the necessity arises, which is basically what I did when my specialty was no longer in great demand.
- peteypao 6y ago
  I'm curious... tell me more about this. What specialty did you have? What did you switch to?
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    Well I was pretty good at XSL-T and XML related technologies, so that was at one point a good thing to be in to, at the time I leveraged that into doing standardization work on the Danish OIOXML project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML where I wrote the schemas for the first versions of the Danish efaktura project (efaktura is format for invoices based on UBL that was required by law for all governmental invoicing) and did a bit of other standardization work. Now at this point if I wasn't such an artistic punk type I would have gone off to private industry and worked in banking etc. as the Danish OIOXML / Efaktura specialist doing consulting work for a few years at a few hundred dollars an hour, instead I got enticed by a friend to go work at a company that I hated for the next couple years because we were going to build a media management product we had tried to do a few years before but this time to do it right! After which there wasn't such a big oioxml efaktura thing anymore but I did still have XSL-T so I did that for several years at Thomson Reuters and then when downsized from there nobody used XSL-T anymore but I had during these years developed my backup search technologies and frontend skills. The last 5 years I've been mainly frontend with some 3-4 months every few years doing search stuff.

DonHopkins 6y ago

I remember when it seemed like a PostScript Email to FAX gateway was going to be a revolutionary way of ordering pizza! Then I got in trouble for accidentally revealing Sun’s secret multimedia “Email-to-Pizza” strategy to the internet. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... It turned out that fax machines have a horrible time transmitting graphics with halftone gray scale patterns: https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.pn... >As it turns out, it takes a hell of a long time to fax a picture of a PostScript pizza, because the PostScript halftone scales and jaggies turn on and off and on and off so quickly and unpredictably that it’s extremely inefficient for the fax algorithms to compress, and very susceptible to line noise. Fax was just not designed for that kind of computer generated imagery!

deleted 6y ago

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