[jjav]

> but even a year away from hands on technical work is going to leave you likely stranded and unable to execute on the technical aspects

This is an interesting myth, but certainly a myth. I guess if we consider technical skill to be intimate knowledge of the latest fad framework, that might be one source of the myth. But that's not technical skills, just trivia about an implementation detail.

The fundamentals like networking, process and memory management, databases and SQL, all change slowly and are very long-lived career-spanning knowledge.

[tyleo]

Agreed, I haven’t seen this in my career at least. I’ve worked with contractors on a yearly basis who would take some time off and then hit the ground running.

If there’s any data supporting the opposite, I’d love to see it.

[rester324]

Kubernetes is not a fad. DynamoDB and MongoDB is not a fad. Golang is not a fad. These were all born in the last few decades, so they are rather new, and they will stay for equally long decades. And the list goes on and on... So all of those skills in your list mean nothing when it comes to these fundamental technical tools. They require an understanding on a completely different abstraction level which is equally complex as of those that you listed.

So if you don't have the understanding of these technologies when the project requires it, you are obsolete and you have no right to be in a leading position. And such fundamental technologies are born continuously.

So this myth that you can have fundamentals and that's enough is definitely untrue.

[jjav]

> Kubernetes is not a fad. DynamoDB and MongoDB is not a fad. Golang is not a fad.

These are indeed good examples of things that are merely tools, not fundamental knowledge.

Time-transport me an expert C programmer from the 80s and I'll have them productive in Go in two weeks. It's all very familiar territory.

O send me a mainframe programmer from the 60s and they'll be up to speed on kubernetes in short order. Pushing your workload to a remote cloud (mainframe) won't be exactly be new to them.

Databases have been studied and their properties understood for a very long time.

Sure, the exact details vary a bit and the command line options are different, but that's not significant.

[rester324]

Yeah, that sounds logical. Some of the most popular technologies of this time are just teeny-tiny tools, but some of long obsolete technologies and their attached skills which have no correlation to anything recent is somehow fundamental and has magical properties in your view :D Thanks for the good laugh!

> Databases have been studied and their properties understood for a very long time.

No they haven't. Noone ever considered schemaless databases or column-storage databases or vector databases for half a century after the birth of computing. So that kind of knowledge (relational DBs, etc in the 60s and 80s) meant nothing in light of these new technologies, and required completely different skills and knowledge.

But it's clear you are not familiar with these technologies, so it's a waste of time to engage with you now