01. Another 'R' Word
As the IT industry moves away from being experience based to skill based, there is another R word most need to worry about, “Rabbit hole” of technology. Take any technology today, there is such a high barrier to entry, Interestingly enough there are avenues to learn really anything at your fingertips and at reasonable price; like never before but there are just too many things to learn to get to what you want to currently learn!
Let’s see some examples, if you need to be any good at cloud you need to be good at networking and really really good at Linux (or powershell, domain controllers etc etc if you are windows person) - anyone saying otherwise is not being totally honest with you. Here on LinkedIn I come across a lot of posts about machine learning and AI but I guarantee you that once you start looking into things like P value and Thompson sampling you would easily spend weeks, yes weeks to really be able to walk the talk. Or best yet bring up an Ethereum node or create your own testnet for blockchain that everyone talks about and the difference between knowing the existence of something to actually knowing anything about it will become that much more stark! Everything you left for option in school/ college, any shortcuts you took are going to come back haunting!
I routinely conduct interviews for Cloud, DevOps and Microservices profiles and people between 2 to 5 years of experience are at least 10 times better than most with 10+ years experienced ones I know. And unlike before when the 10+ year experienced ones would already be comfortably (for them) away from technology that is no more true. The 2 to 5 years beat them also by having a clean slate and being able to better abstract the technology at hand and well just by having more energy. For most of the coveted positions in one of the cloud centric projects, we rarely interviewed anyone above 6 years of experience.
Add to that most organizations are rapidly moving away from the business of in house training to a gig model, where they pull the ready to plug talent from market and leaving the onus of upskilling solely on the existing employees wanting to retain their jobs (in near to medium term). And yet frankly I rarely come across someone seriously training for something. I get humbled by the sheer vastness of IT in general every day and then when I come to Linkedin and notice everyone talking about everything from cloud to blockchain to AI, it amuses me. I am sure many of you have come across the rabbit hole, and I am sure some of you went back to the study table, let me know your experiences !
P.S. what is the original “R” word, everyone in IT fears about ? well if you have not figured out it yet, hint, “Sept 2008”
Thank you for reading!
-Nikhil