Ask HN: Do you study for your job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you study for your job?

I do root cause analysis for a complex piece of software. For a couple of years I've been doing fine at my job, but last week I decided to read a rather dense book on the software and related topics, and I'm doing flash cards. I feel that my ability to diagnose and troubleshoot issues is limited by having to look things up all the time.

Does anyone else study for their job? If so, has it had an impact? I limit myself to 30-60 minutes a day, because I want to maintain some work-life balance.

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Continuing education is mandatory in many fields. In tech, no one forces you to do it, but if you want to keep your skills current, then you have to study—not only to keep up but to get better. If you don't, then you won't have much of a career. So, yes, many of us continue to study.

If not "study," I'd strongly suggest doing regular "homework" for your work.

For instance, unlike in the early days and well into the 2010s, most mobile UI and UX are solved. You know how users use apps and how they want something to respond to. However, I still find many people in tech, even after "years of experience," always think about their company, their app, and how specific actions of the users impact them. I usually ask them, "What about the customers and the users?". Remember that for most users, your app/website is just one of the many they use.

This simple example is easily resolved by doing regular homework—studying how others do things and how users use their apps.

I think "looking things up all the time" (plus "figuring things out all the time") is the primary method of how I learn. This was the case back in college too - solving practical problems (homeworks, projects) was the best way to actually learn stuff, just reading the textbooks caused most info to disappear right after exams.

I think that this works well, to a point. Eventually, mastery demands memorization, because fluency demands memorization.

But do you need to do a memorization with a separate step, with flash cards and dedicated time? Or do you naturally memorize stuff as you work with it - after 3rd time you read up consistent hashing, you just remember it when you see it the 4th time? For me it's very much the latter.

(Note this does not mean I don't read boring books - for this to work, one has to read about related topics too. So if I am trying to troubleshoot code which uses consistent hashing, I'd read some texts on it, plus related topics like DHTs and maybe weight assignment strategies)

Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence—however…

I don’t dispute that you will come to remember something after needing it several times. But without a more or less comprehensive knowledge of the subject, how do you know if there’s something you haven’t thought you needed, that would have solved the day’s problem faster or better than what you came up with via targeted search? How do you know there aren’t several such things?

I also strongly suspect that having all or most of the facts about a subject immediately available to your mind gives you the ability to think about it in a way that you otherwise couldn’t. Perhaps I’ll post an update in a few months once I’ve thoroughly studied the text I’m working through. If I’m no more adept at analysis, I’ll admit it. I’ll report the negative result.

So I guess we’ll see if it works for at least one of us.

I study things that I'm interested in that would be useful for my job all the time.

I sometimes study things specifically for my job.

Yes. It has continually had an impact.

I read up on the latest in software engineering for my own benefit/interest. I don't do anything at all for my job outside of work. Whatever skills I gain I may use at my job later, or I may take them to a new company.

Yes. The curse of being an expert is having to maintain that expertise.

minimum 1hr of every day at work, since 1999. no need to deal with work/life balance, it is part of your work and to be done during work hours.

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