This is a critical concept that appears to be poorly understood in at least the web development circles I run in.
It reminds me of one of my favorite Bill Gates quotes:
"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."
Not knowing about a rarely used operator isn't that big of a deal, but the "hard" part of fizzBuzz is trivial in the couple of languages I am proficient in.
#6 might be the only real chance the US has of having less divisive politics. Moving the upper middle class and wealthy out of cities could change the game entirely by making the political extremes less concentrated geographically.
5G may help to at least some degree. Most people don't need Gigabit or anything like that. But it's nice to have a better alternative to satellite and (sometimes) hotspots which are your only options if you can't get broadband today.
I just read the article and was like “I don’t think I suffer from these much at all” then read this comment. This is very insightful and also something I just realized that I greatly suffer from. Thanks.
I think one of the symptoms is not picking up enough detailed understanding of anything because you keep moving around and don't believe in most external knowledge anyway (eg. don't want to learn [beyond a certain depth] SQL, it's so ugly on some inner level I'd much rather start with datalog and build my own up, don't want to learn economics I don't trust those science cargo-culters). But the other reason you don't want to specialize is that it would be to accept a limit on yourself (OK I'm going to get specialize on getting very good at c++, my upper salary cap is 500k and likely cap 200k, career is mapped out).
One of the things that's slowly curing me I think is running into examples of systems that are genuinely very heavy to understand/improve, and examples of people who are just unarguably higher ceiling in different ways than you.
eg. go watch a SGM play 30 second hyperbullet chess, I don't think I have either the memory or raw processing speed to do what they do, ever. If those guys exist a lot of other people have way higher ceilings. Also realize that chess (and by extension must be a lot of other activities) rely on both a crazy cpu, an amazing memory and an insanely built-out internal database of positions and ideas, and since my cpu is good but not unbelievable, my memory is nothing special and my time is limited there must be a lot of activities I'll never really be good at. Also just getting older and staying unsuccessful relative to your ego, you just start to compromise I think.
> SQL, it's so ugly on some inner level I'd much rather start with datalog and build my own up
SQL syntax may be ugly, but for once, it's an example of a widely used technology that is based on a very firm and well thought out theoretical framework.
As a developer, it is definitely worth investing time in understanding relational databases and the theory behind them.
It reminds me of one of my favorite Bill Gates quotes:
"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."