
To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop - digisth
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-in-a-career-workers-train-nonstop.html?ref=business
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mark_l_watson
The need for continuous education is accelerating for a lot of careers. I have
taken 4 online classes this year, I have bought at least 12 technical books
(probably read about half of the pages in them) and I am working on writing a
new book (actually a revised edition of my old Java AI book).

I probably spend 1 hour on these self learning activities for every 2 hours I
spend making money on my business (consulting). I am comfortable with this
investment for two reasons. First, I feel like this provides me with a secure
long term business. Second, the learning time is fun and relaxing - not as
much as my hobbies hiking, cooking, and music, but still, I count studying
time as a form of recreation.

------
adrianhoward
My dad went from helping out at my grandfather's high street shop to designing
satellite test rigs, and ending up specialising in conveyer systems of all
things.

My partner's dad went from painting ships in Chatham dockyards to helping
design and build nuclear submarines, power stations & containment facilities,
and ended up working in nuclear medicine.

Neither of 'em went to university.

Continual on-the-job learning doesn't seem like a terribly new thing...

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kiba
There are two type of knowledge: timeless, and changing specifics.

API, libraries, and platform are specifics. It's something you learn and throw
away (eventually).

Continuous deployment, unit testing, debugging, basic programming knowledge,
are timeless.

One thing to keep in mind: Even timeless knowledge will be subjected to decay
if you don't practice it.

~~~
gaius
I'd say there were 3 kinds: the timeless stuff is _actual computer science_ ,
y'know, the hard stuff: maths. The long-lived knowledge is things that have
stood the test of time, e.g. languages like SQL and C (and its toolchain) -
but I wouldn't gamble on C being around as long as say, the quicksort
algorithm. C++ and Perl and Python probably fall at the outer edge of this
category, we'll know in 10 years. People who know these things well won't have
any trouble finding work in the near future, even if they don't put any extra
effort in (but show me this kind of programmer who doesn't anyway, just
because it's fun).

Then there is stuff that you need to know _right now_ which is really just the
whims of fashion, the latest abstraction layer over Javascript (JQuery?
Coffeescript? I lose track) or web framework and the latest fad methodology
(Scrum, TDD or whatever). This is stuff that ages very quickly, in just a
year's time your skills could be obsolete. I pick up just as much of these
kinds of skills as I need, but there's no point investing serious time into
them. These guys are running flat out just to keep up. It must be exhausting.

5 years mastering C is an investment in your future. 5 years mastering MongoDB
probably isn't.

~~~
mathgladiator
> 5 years mastering C is an investment in your future. 5 years mastering
> MongoDB probably isn't.

Replace C with COBOL and MongoDB with MySQL.

I've thought about this recently, and I think Java may replace C as the
investment. There's so many companies now that depend on it, that knowing the
JVM and it's... oddities is an investment.

I think MongoDB now is a bet. It may actually pan out, but we will not know
until 10+ years out.

~~~
jboggan
Hadoop will make Java more and more relevant.

~~~
nostrademons
Assuming something better than Hadoop doesn't come out. From what I've heard
from folks who have used Hadoop and then used MapReduce, that's not really a
safe bet.

------
henrik_w
I've been coding for over 20 years, and I can't say I find it "exhausting"
having to learn new languages, tools and techniques. On the contrary, learning
new things keeps me from getting bored.

Also, constant learning is already a prerequisite for programmers, since
coding to a large extent is a discovery process. You learn and discover more
about the problem as you develop the solution.

------
bryanlarsen
The article implies that this is a new phenomenon brought on by the advent of
computers. Computers have certainly accelerated this trend but certain
occupations have had this problem since before computers were ubiquitous. For
example doctors have to regularly submit proof of continuous learning or they
lose their license to practice.

~~~
josephmosby
Same thing for me as a CPA. Even though I'm not specialized in actually
putting an entry into the books or doing taxes, I still have to keep up with
forty formal hours of training a year. Courses have to be approved by state
societies before they'll even count for continuing education.

~~~
molsongolden
What is your specialization? At my firm and position level CPE is just a paid
day of learning which is great.

~~~
josephmosby
IT internal controls and audit support.

Also, I don't just work for a CPA firm, I _am_ a CPA. Subject to all the CPE
requirements set by the state society if I want to maintain my title. For me
this year, my requirements were satisfied by six paid days of learning but I
could have done it through a series of one-hour online courses if I hated
myself.

------
Codhisattva
This is an especially important point for coders. In my 23 year professional
life I've had 4 very different careers, involving 7 major platform changes, at
least a dozen different languages and more SDK documentation that I can
remember.

It's not like technology or the rate of change will be slowing down in the
future either.

So, learning how to learn efficiently is an important tech skill.

~~~
vonmoltke
I do this constantly, even if my explorations never get beyond surface
exploration of new things. My career has moved from electrical engineer->(non-
IT) systems engineer->real-time algorithms software engineer (C)->non-real-
time algorithms software engineer (Java). Over this course (so far) I have
worked in a dozen languages, and may have a dozen more in the next decade. I
also try to keep myself astride the hardware-software boundary as best I can.

My most frustrating professional experience so far was working in a
sequestered program in my prior company where almost everyone in engineering
leadership positions had been doing the same damn thing for 20+ years and
could not understand why anyone would want to keep learning and trying out new
technologies. In fact, showing too much interest in technologies unrelated to
the program could be interpreted negatively.[1] I'm both amazed and horrified
that such an attitude could persist in this day and age in such a company, but
I guess that comes from the program's somewhat unique situation.

[1] The old guard on this program had the attitude that you could spend your
entire career on it and its derivatives, so there was no reason to want to
leave unless you were unhappy, in which case there must be something wrong
with you.

~~~
coopdog
Just out of interest, were the old guard who refused to learn the (non-IT)
systems engineers? I've had similar experiences with senior engineers and am
trying to work out how (or whether) the field should be saved

~~~
vonmoltke
They were by-and-large the systems engineers. Most had math or physics degrees
(BS->PhD), and the rest had various engineering degrees. The bigger problem in
this case, though, is the isolation of this project from everything else. Its
hard for me to explain properly without the details I can't provide, but in
short this group had a really hard problem to solve, and did so. Some people
built their entire careers on this, and they developed this destructive
attitude that is part Not Invented Here and part superiority complex. The
result was that whatever a handful of the senior engineers though was the best
approach was the direction "development"[1] went, no matter the evidence to
the contrary.

I don't think this is indicative of the discipline as a whole. The discipline
is necessary in many market segments. Even software companies have systems
engineers; they just call them software architects. I'm not sure what could be
done about a situation like I described above, though.

If you want to discuss this more offline, you can get my contact info from my
profile.

[1] "Development" in this case was taking obsolete algorithm code, hacking in
new functionality as quickly as possible, and forcing it to work with minimal
perceived effort in the top-level system where all the software was being
written from scratch.

------
ruswick
This just seems obvious to me. Granted, I'm only 16 and have had but one foray
into the world of corporate employment, but the notion that someone can learn
a skill early in their life and practice it indefinitely without expanding or
improving upon it literally makes me want to laugh. The world simply moves at
too rapid a pace not to constantly be learning.

The need to improve yourself as an employee doesn't exactly count as news.
Intellectual stasis is career death.

~~~
zootar
You seem to be mocking a claim that no one is making, namely, that it's
reasonable to expect salary increases throughout one's career while relying
_exclusively_ on some limited initial training. The claim actually being made
is that in any career, of the self-improvement necessary for advancement, some
fraction can be realized during normal, paid work hours, and that the size of
this fraction is trending downward.

------
bennesvig
As society speeds up, Eric Hoffers great quote becomes increasingly relevant:

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The
learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer
exists."

------
hkarthik
As a developer, in addition to retraining yourself, you also may need to
change jobs fairly often. Often it's the only way to utilize and develop newly
acquired skills if you want to stay relevant and make the skill acquisition
worth it.

However, I think it's easy to get caught into the rat race and overlook what
it means to be "irrelevant". If I look back at my coworkers who stayed behind
(in terms of training and advancement), most of them have very fulfilling
lives with more work/life balance and stability. They just made certain
compromises in terms of having jobs thrown at them all the time or in having
higher salaries.

I'm still trying to find my own personal balance here, especially as I've
grown older and had my family responsibilities increase.

~~~
cpeterso
> _As a developer, in addition to retraining yourself, you also may need to
> change jobs fairly often. Often it's the only way to utilize and develop
> newly acquired skills if you want to stay relevant and make the skill
> acquisition worth it._

This is a good point. It is very easy to pigeonholed on a big company project
to work for five years, but only get "one year of experience, five times."

------
justinph
A less aggressive method is to attempt to achieve things that you're not sure
how to do you. Learning is built in to every project, then.

------
panda_person
But isn't this the way it is in tech? No one cares if you have a solid grasp
of the fundamentals that rarely (if ever) change. Its all about knowing the
trendy platform/language du jour. Which, I'd think, is a bad thing-it
encourages people to hop onto fads to learn in order to get jobs, but I'm not
sure if it really encourages people to learn fundamentals.

~~~
zxcdw
Depends greatly on the domain. While certainly true for areas in which
products are created within months if not weeks and new technologies come and
go every few months, it's very different for areas in which product
development stage lasts for years and active product maintenance lasts for a
decade or two.

It seems that further the domain is away from the fundamental concepts, the
more it relies on ad-hoc stuff. I guess that's what abstraction layers and
exposure to "general public" does, lots of leaky abstractions going to all
directions imaginable. Perhaps someone finds this progress fascinating, I
certainly don't.

------
chm
Communist Manifesto, 1848.

Take some time to read it - even if you don't agree with the ideas - and
indulge in that 19th century prescience.

~~~
myth_drannon
For those who don't have spare time, care to relate the manifesto to the
parent article ?

~~~
mahmud
The most widely read political tract of all time, at less than 50 pages. I
think you owe it to yourself to see what the fuss is all about.

My understanding is that Marx, and op, sees this constant training as a
negative. Workers sell their skills and time; constant obselesence of works'
skills to keep up with the Capitalists' automation of the job, in persuit of
higher efficiency and lower costs (i.e. salary), is, in my understanding of
Marx's ideas, a Bad Thing(TM).

This is not because Marx is a luddite and the workers anti-intellectuals, but
because constant training weakens the labor guilds and unions. Workers cannot
form any sort of long-term professional union if their skills are being
obseleted constantly. This destruction of independent labor renders us all
subservient to Capital and Capitalists, who are the only ones afforded the
luxury of being in charge of their future and destiny.

~~~
philwelch
So innovation is a capitalist plot. Got it.

~~~
mahmud
What a cheap way to oversimplify what I wrote.

Do you seriously think Socialist societies are not capable of technological
advances?

Marxism is an economic framework, and there is no way avoiding technological
advances in an economy. It's just that in Marxism, innovation comes from
workers and joint stakeholders of the means of production. Not owners of
Capital.

The software market is MUCH closer to the Marxist ideal than a Capitalist free
market, specially in Free Software. But I don't expect to get an intelligent
conversation here,so, alas ..

~~~
philwelch
"Do you seriously think Socialist societies are not capable of technological
advances?"

Construct one and we'll see. Previous attempts basically turned into murderous
oligarchies. To me, that places Marxism outside the realm of practical
consideration, since it seems impossible to actually implement.

Less flippantly, it's always been engineers and inventors rather than
investors (capitalists) who are responsible for innovation.

------
guylhem
Some minor training might be needed to stay relevant - that's true in any job.

But if you find yourself in need of almost continuous training, like the guy
described in the article, you have a problem

Leaving aside the medical problems (memory problems, attention issues):

1) Maybe you have badly invested your time, ie. in knowledge with a negative
interest rate (ie a fad - the technology du-jour which will be outdated
tomorrow) - then you need to keep pumping knowledge. Your problem is not in
the learning, but in the choice of the topic - i.e. learn something else!

2) Maybe also you are not specializing enough, i.e. carving your niche in a
domain where you knowledge would create a significant barrier of entry? But
that'd be another way of saying your topic has a positive interest rate and
that you are just compounding interest!

In both cases, it seems to me to be a problem of a wrong choice (leaving aside
the fact that you shouldn't resent what you are doing, if you really love it)

So do something else, find your where your competitive advantage is or where
your passions leads you.

