On Getting Old(er) in Tech

Don't love everything in this article, but a few pieces I think are solid. Like this:

When I hear someone say they have 20 years of experience, I wonder if that’s really true or if they merely had 1 year of experience 20 times. I’ve known too many developers that used the same techniques they learned in their first year of employment for the entire span of their career...My point is certainly not that younger developers are smarter. It’s that many programmers let themselves grow stale. And the bigger problem is, after doing the same year’s worth of experience ten times, many programmers forget how to learn. Not only can it be extremely hard to catch up with ten years of technology, it can be next to impossible if you’ve forgotten how to learn.

If you plan on being in the IT field for more than 10 years, you need to be a lifelong learner. I’ve always been a lifelong learner. I’ve learned and developed with numerous programming languages, frameworks, and strategies. As a result, I’ve honed my learning skills.

“I’ve honed my learning skills”, a resume piece indeed. I need someone who will take on whatever is thrown at them. That might mean doing it yourself. Or it might mean finding someone else to do it. Or it might mean recruiting the aid of someone else, who does know what they're doing, and letting them guide you through to the completion of the project.

For example, at my most recent job, a customer promise was made with significant business implications. I was asked to help lead the engineering effort through to completion. All I was given was a repository for a codebase nobody understood which was written in Ruby (a language I don’t know except for the occasional fiddling around with Jekyll). But hey, it was a problem that needed to be solved to add value to the business. So I dived in, recruited others to help, and saw it through.