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by harryvederci
1801 days ago
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Former IBM employee here. When I joined IBM, Watson was all the rage. I made sure I got on a Watson team, which happened. During the training phase, I quickly realised I was only learning things that were specific to Watson. I really hate the idea of learning things that are not transferable, so I quickly backed out. I dodged some blockchain projects as well, and got me on some good old full stack projects. This comment is not meant as an answer to the article title (it's behind a login/pay wall, so I couldn't read it), but I can imagine there are some other fantastic concepts out there that people are not willing to learn, because they have to think about their own career as well, not just about the success of their company. The sad thing is: I was really good at the Watson thing. I just didn't want to invest in it myself. |
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I spent nearly a decade at Microsoft on the Windows team. I was working in a private codebase with C++ frameworks that no one else in the industry had exposure to, using technologies like Win32 and kernel debugging that were either out of fashion or were internal technologies other companies didn't have access to. For a long time it was using proprietary source control, proprietary bug/project tracking - you get the idea.
When I switched companies, none of that mattered. Technology is boring and easy to teach. Career skills are important. I was learning to evaluate business needs and customer requests, to triage and plan issues, to design feature, to mentor and lead junior engineers, to think about things like accessibility and internationalization. These are the important things, and they all transfer.
I went on an interview loop, got several offers, and took one at a company working mostly in Java (which I hadn't used before joining that company) doing server-side backend work (which I hadn't done before joining that company). It didn't matter; I was up to speed on the basics in a couple of weeks, fully productive within a couple months, and a valued member of the team by my first performance review.