> The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. It's my experience that while not easy thi

> The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. It's my experience that while not easy this is relatively straightforward for many valuable types of technical work. The key I've found is that most people are incapable of making themselves seriously work through a textbook. Work through 10-15 good sized textbooks in your field and you are pretty much immediately near the top of your field in the professional world. Most of the churn in skills is happening at much lower levels of abstraction. If you have the fundamentals to understand the higher abstractions backing these changes making a switch is much easier. As a concrete example, I'm at a big tech company using Typescript (TS). While I have less experience with TS than most of my coworkers many already consider me "one of the local experts". This is because: 1. I was previously aware of the challenges Racket trying to add types back in... I think the early 2000s? Forever ago. Anyway I could guess at the limitations TS would have as a result (e.g. when a type inference might fail). 2. I read a book about TS 3. I read the TS docs and changelogs (2) and (3) to roughly 12 hours total. I've had plenty of conversations with people who are much more "guru-ish" than I am and they report similar results e.g. a database expert who has spent 20 years almost exclusively leveraging knowledge discovered in the 80s despite keeping up to date with the field. I don't think this holds in Academia, but most of us aren't there.