Should I Learn Something New?

There’s only so much time, so keep your wits about you and always have a plan. Now, consider your next moves.

Photo by Nadjib BR on Unsplash

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Today, a question and some hopefully sage advice from an embattled rook, safely walled away from the real world — for that is the piece I consider myself to be — in the grand game of software engineering.

I’ve been in a lot of interviews lately, in one way or another, and it’s getting increasingly difficult for me not to speak up about something. Primarily I’m seeing many less experienced software engineers playing their first moves in the grand game clearly not thinking of the longer term implications of their strategy choices.

It’s fairly easy to see the following at interview, whether you see it in the interviewer or interviewee:

• Something is actually excited by the technology they work with.
  (For me, that’s the Apple ecosystem, Swift, C, SQL, and the Wolfram Language — though it’s excitement littered with hitting myself with my keyboard with the Wolfram Language. Bit masochistic? Yeah, tell me about it)
• Someone is okay with the technology but it’s not their true love, they don’t get that tingly feeling, and are using it as a gateway to get somewhere else.
  (For me that would be AWS, or say general DevOps or CI/CD box…