Gaining Years of Experience in a Few Months

What the author calls the "fast growth phase" - I call "walking the tightrope and/or knife's edge". Our minds are in a constant state of attempting to optimize away any task. This is why there's a huge difference in skill levels between a person who has driven a car for 5 weeks vs 5 years, but nearly zero difference between somebody who has driven a car for 5 years vs 50 years.

The CHALLENGE is in constantly forcing your mind back to the knife's edge - and it varies from person to person.

Back when I was a highschooler, I was unsatisfied with my sheet reading capabilities. To fix it, I

- started playing only new sheet music

- grabbed a old hymnal (from the 1950s) which are rhythmically simplistic but usu. have four voices.

- Wrote a very simple app that generated random sheetxml

- Borrowed a friend's sheet music for the organ (which has three staves) and tried to transpose it on the fly to play with just the two hands on the piano

To do these conversions, you'd need a solid understanding of what each YOE entails, and there is no good or widely accepted definition on that, otherwise it would be the hiring standard and career path standard.

I only say this because you can't literally put down that you gained 6 YOE on your resume - you will instead convert it to milestones and accomplishments and deliverables, all of which are completely understandable concepts and better suited to get your point across.

Time to drop this flawed thinking IMO

I think we have the feeling of "gaining years of experience in a few months", when we experience multiple skills we developed coalesce into a synergic unity that enables rapid growth. The author touches it too:

> To be honest, the whole process felt the final exam after my then 6 years spent at the company. To get the expected results I really had to leverage all my skills and energy.

It's worth noticing that all the progress in his diagram measures one dimension, but this is a sour recipe to measure life as it pushes yourself beyond your boundaries into burnout. It's much better to measure things using Pareto frontiers: pick up the important dimensions that you want to measure a decision or your progress against, then ask yourself how you are doing when you fix some or all but one. If you pick your important dimensions in life based on your long-term goals, it's harder this way to push beyond your limits into burnout or to slack off if you strive to be close to the optimal frontiner.

Seems like most people really overvalue pressure and long hours, when those are neither necessary nor sufficient—hell, probably harmful—for doing and learning a lot. I'm not entirely sure why, but I expect a cultural "no pain, no gain" attitude is part of it. People want to feel like the pain they went through was worth something, and we're conditioned that anything that's worth doing takes pain, and the two attitudes reinforce each other.

But for anyone who wants to have such an experience for more than a few weeks, I believe they need to be strategic:

- They need to figure out what area they need to work in early, like really early, preferably during/before college, because it is the first job that counts. They need to get in ASAP, because there is a hell lot of difference between someone starting at 10 and someone at 30;

- They need to think strategically about which kind of people they want to marry to, or do they want a marriage at all. IMO, if they want to be high-achievers (it's not an accurate word, but you know what I mean), there are only two kinds of good partners -- comrades or servants. Comrades keep you motivated and can interact with you on the same page, while servants take away most of your distractions. Kids are 100% a time sinker even for the best of them, so don't get them too early;

- They need to find a good mentor, or more, along the road, at least before they reach where they can grow by themselves. Or they are lucky to have an above average amount of perseverance (which I believe is defined by gene and early education -- again, mostly genetic) so they can throw themselves at any wall and still preserve;

So basically, they need to be lucky. And if they are not that lucky, they need to be at least lucky enough to realize and think about it strategically at an earlier age (like, before 30, I think) and plan accordingly. They need to muscle into the positions they want. They need to push things and people around to make their own career paths.

You can be burnt out doing fast paced repetitive work. It’s not always true the faster you go the more you learn.

This makes no sense to me. If you spend five years working on a tech stack that goes out of favor, then some will say you've wasted your time. Personally, I disagree, because experience is experience and what we do is learn, but good luck getting through an HR filter with that.

This just seems like one of those "I'm the beneficiary of luck, now let me tell you how I credit myself for it" posts.

My personal experience is that I've had the greatest growth when I was allowed to pursue what I'm interested in (e.g. coding styles, new libraries, new methods of structuring code such as functional vs OOP). When I get a meddling manager insisting that I do things some other way, I don't learn and grow nearly as much.

Yes, experience compression is absolutely possible without sacrificing an appendage. This is actually an expectation for military officers and corporate executives. The solution is just to stay continuously busy.

The counterpoint to this is alienation. Most people at the individual contributor level absolutely do not think about this. The problem then is that if you are that guy who is a 10x producer you are completely out of alignment from your peers. If you are in a line of work where people are replaceable cogs like Java and JavaScript this out of bounds levels of initiative is probably doing your career more harm than good.