| There are two kinds of mindsets when it comes to learning: a consumer mindset and an autodidact mindset. In an organization, it's easy to recognize consumers -- they typically say things like: "I don't understand this. Is there a training course for this that I can sign up for?" and expect to be assigned to an internal training session or to some external course. An autodidact on the other hand goes: "I don't understand this. Let me do some research on my own and try to teach myself." I've been both at various junctures in my life but I've learned that in order to progress to higher levels, it's better to be an autodidact instead of a consumer. When it comes to new knowledge, there's rarely someone who will feed it to me -- I have to take the initiative to learn it myself. There's nothing wrong in asking for a clarifying blurb (good marketing aims to make things frictionless for potential customers). But RocksDB is its own universe and it's actually pretty well known. I don't work in this space, and even I know what RocksDB is because it has come up a lot in technical discussions about storage engines. When I first encountered it, I had no idea what it was, but I gathered from comments that people were excited about it, so I googled "wiki rocksdb". It took 2 seconds. Truly curious people are autodidacts, not consumers. p.s. the HN comment section is a great venue to "overhear" what the community is talking about and what they find exciting. It provides a good signal to dive into certain topics. Knowledge acquisition is very much a sociological exercise as much as it is an individual one. |
As someone who is very autodidact, I can tell you, that just because I don't understand something doesn't mean I go and learn it. There are far too many things to do and to learn just to go and learn things when I have a reason to. Just like consumers will ask for training sessions when they have a reason to.
This is marketing 101, you have a product and you want people to use it. Even in open source, you still want people to use it, you want there to be value in the thing that you built. Build it and they will come doesn't work.
> There's nothing wrong in asking for a clarifying blurb (good marketing aims to make things frictionless for potential customers). But RocksDB is its own universe and it's actually pretty well known. I don't work in this space, and even I know what RocksDB is because it has come up a lot in technical discussions about storage engines. When I first encountered it, I had no idea what it was, but I gathered from comments that people were excited about it, so I googled "wiki rocksdb". It took 2 seconds.
I have heard of RocksDB before, but I still don't know the use-case, why? Because there are so many other database systems. And even if I was using RocksDB looking at that paper I don't know why as a company I would invest in a rewrite to switch over to this new one, since the performance benefits don't seem massively clear.
> Truly curious people are autodidacts, not consumers.
What I think you think autodidacts are, are people with no focus and spend time researching every new thing that pops up. The sort of people that "Jack of all trades, master of none" is made up to describe.