2 ms·
If your technical knowledge is 20 years out of date, as an individual contributor you can't be hired although worst case you can't do much damage. On the other
by VLM 5y ago
If your technical knowledge is 20 years out of date, as an individual contributor you can't be hired although worst case you can't do much damage. On the other hand if your technical knowledge is 20 years out of date, then its much safer for the company to put you in charge of direction and goal setting and hiring decisions and so forth.
A Visual Basic 6 programmer "can't" be hired to program in Javascript, although its the same people and skills 25 years apart. However put that VB6 programmer in a management role and somehow that completely obsolete technical skillset is "invaluable", LOL.
- Mezzie 5y agoYes, because from a business standpoint, you should care where your product is going to be after 20 years, and the VB6 programmer knows that eventually JS might not be a thing and will think of architecture decisions like 'we'll have to transition this to another language, how should we make that process easier?' Likewise, some lessons transfer. "Huh, that time we were working on Thing X and relying solely on Bob's technological expertise we were completely screwed and the company went under after after Bob had an aneurysm, I should make sure there are no single points of failure on the team knowledge wise." Or "Man, we built such a beautiful Visual Basic 6 program, but the interface was so bad nobody used it and we failed. Let's make sure our front end and back end people are communicating properly." Or, "This was the most elegant technical solution, but then it turned out nobody had the resources to run it. So let's make sure to do our user testing and make sure we're designing appropriately."