Reading through Dreaming in Code (more on that another day), I kept being struck by technology after technology and project after project that I'd at one time been interested in, followed, used, or whatever. None of which of course are relevant at all today. Not atypical in computing. The positive spin would be that to stay relevant, you're constantly learning, which is a good thing in so many ways. The other side of it would be that what you learn rarely builds on what you knew before, but replaces it entirely, leaving the old knowledge essentially useless.
The one area where things don't change quite as fast (or at least as drastically) is the development process and management side of things. But we all know how well we suck at that.
Imagine if professions like medicine or law behaved the same way, where existing knowledge needed to be replaced within some small number of years (not updated, not added to, but replaced). Any other fields as bad as, or worse than, computing in this regard?
Comments