[Arainach]

What's "transferrable" is fungible. If you think you're only learning things specific to Watson, you're not looking at a big enough picture.

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.