Does Tech Knowledge Really Last Long?

Here is one question we do not frequently ask when we are in the field of technology which is How soon before the things we know today become useless to us tomorrow?

There is what is known in science as the half-life of knowledge, the amount of time that half of what we know in an area will become obsolete or outdated. In medicine, it can be decades. But in technology? Its half life is extremely brief. It’s between 2 and 3 years in many cases.

Think about like ten years ago,

• Nearly all sites were based on the use of jQuery. Modern applications today are created using React, Vue, or Angular or even Svelte.
• Most teams had used SVN or even zip files containing the code to control the version. At this point, Git has grown to be the standard of the day.
• Stacks on the back-end continue to develop. In less than ten years, we have switched to serverless, microservices, and cloud-native architectures or stacks in place of LAMPs (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
• And even languages remain such. Python 2 was ubiquitous until recently and it has since disappeared, with Python 3 and later.

But here is the point, all knowledge does not fade away equally. Basic skills, such as algorithms, database design, networking, and problem solving, are not used up in one year or decade. These are your long term investments. Frameworks, libraries, and tools on the other hand are more of a short-term stock that can be useful today but may change tomorrow.

This creates a very serious question in us all which is, What do you personally do to keep your skills up to date in such a dynamic area?

Other developers test out side projects in an attempt to learn new frameworks. There are those that depend on online courses and certifications. Team knowledge-sharing sessions or open-source projects help many sharpen their knowledge. And finally, there is always the old-fashioned technique which is good old trial-and error debugging.

We cannot say there is one correct answer, but we take a risk not to ask the question. When we cease learning, things that we were once proficient in will one day disappear creating gaps to our capacity of giving and adapting. On the other hand, life-long learning, unlearning and relearning keep us significant and future-fit.

So, back to you,

Do you have a continuous learning system?

And how do you balance learning the new shiny toys and reinforcing the old basics?