4 ms·

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

by 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.

by taneq 6y ago

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.