The half-life of tech skills
haraldagterhuis.substack.com
haraldagterhuis.substack.com
My knowledge gets outdated: APIs change, the top of the hour is a different one.
Skills and especially abstract skills don’t get outdated as fast: Writing cuda kernels is surprisingly like the stuff we did in my first ever C class 25 years ago and I am still reading doc the same way my teacher taught me in 7th grade.
The more you look the more things are the same. All that is done was done and has been done before; there is nothing new under the sun.
Okay, he was obviously very new to the field and had no idea, but it illustrates how the field progressed in the past 10 years, and a person who is just joining has very similar starting line to old-timers. The breadth of knowledge I have is of course extremely useful and I am able to get new concepts really fast, as there are many similarities. But the market in general does not care that much really.
Also, skills and knowledge are different things, right? I’d believe that half the skills picked up in a fast-growing field are obsolete after a couple years.
Very little about Go is entirely novel. It’s a newer descendant of C with some additions and excisions but mostly similar syntax. The language is newer, but the way you use it isn’t that new. Java is about equivalent to C++. PHP and Ruby were inspired by Perl and took things in different directions, while Perl itself was an amalgamation of C, BasicPlus, Lisp, shell, and the common shell tools like sed, awk, and tr. From Ruby comes Crystal. From PHP comes Hack.
tmux isn’t entirely different from screen.
git works differently, but on the surface isn’t drastically different from Subversion.
ssh is basically rsh with encryption.
Zsh and Bash are basically in the Bourne / Korn family trees of shells.
Docker has a nicer CLI interface, but a lot of the same concepts as LXC, LXD, jails, and more. Podman inherited a lot from Docker.
make, cmake, imake, Ant, SCons, and other build systems cover the same tasks with different syntax.
GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins all cover CI/CD differently, but how to build a reliable pipeline is a skill that transfers to new syntax and configuration file names.
Beyond that, the essay is a rambling mishmash of ideas and unsourced assertions with no real point to it.
It's not like companies are molting their stacks every two years or something. If you are hired today, you skill and knowledge will evolve as the company evolves
The things I've learned about the JVM in the 2000's are still mostly true, perhaps with a bit of tweaking.
The things I've learned about process, project management, some distilled concepts around refactoring, testing - all still very valuable and as true as when I learned them. Perhaps not the specific tools, but the concepts are valuable.
Learning C decades ago still has lots of value. Not to mention SQL - come on.
Learn that cool JS tech stack a few years back? Yeah, it's probably dead or radically changed. That integration with Company X? Same.
So clearly there's some distinction to be made here. People are still programming in FORTRAN in some niches. You can decide to invest in boring and stable approaches, or live on the bleeding edge relying on someone's weekend vibe code session.
"courtesy of Harvard Business Review" - there's your problem. Don't look to some MBAs to give you nuanced tech insight. The author of this article: "Harald Agterhuis" is just some recruiter. Of course he's got an incentive to push this BS.
My recommendation? Flag this low quality article.
On a personal level, the fundamentals will be useful for your entire career, and the more you know, the faster you will be able to get the skill-du-jour. But the idea is that on your résumé, expect to change half of the lines in your "skills" section every 2.5 years, even if it takes you no more than a few hours to add these lines.
It also brushes aside tech in industries like defense, aviation, assembly lines, etc... where you have big, expensive machines, certifications, and projects that span decades. I wouldn't be surprised to find some Fortran code somewhere in the foundries that build the latest AI chips as EUV lithography literally took decades of R&D before it went to production.
And that’s just the tangible stuff. Not to speak about DDD, TDD, clean code, cicd, debugging, and a large etc.
My skills don’t degrade. Each thing I have learned in the past helps me when learning the next hot thing. These “outdated” skills are an investment, not a waste; they are what makes me being a software engineer with X years of experience.
Even so, there are specific skills you can learn that are older than most people and will continue to be relevant, like SQL, vi, the terminal.
Of course if all the career maintenance happens on paid company time, then I see no problem. But unfortunately for SWE's at least that's often not the case.