I had an internship right out of high school and the team I was working on had five employees. I, a high schooler with no formal CS education, was replacing them. I was rewriting all of their legacy code and making huge improvements on it. Furthermore, the legacy program was written in ASP, a language I’d never used before. This is great for me now but what’s going to happen when I’ve been working for 20 years and the new hot-shot intern is learning languages in weeks that I’ve spent my life perfecting?
The answer is simple and well-known in the CS world: “keep learning.” The problem is, it’s much easier said than done. Fortunately for us, Web2.0 has ushered in new technologies and trends to make this much easier:
- Blogs are a great source of the new trendy stuff. By nature, they tend to be about new and exciting technologies that the author is particularly excited about, making him/her a perfect candidate to explain to you how this new stuff works and in a relatively quick and painless way.
- Video sites like YouTube and Google Video are great for learning. The problem of learning once you graduate from college is that you don’t have a wealth of Ph.D.s around to explain how their fields work. These are the guys that define the field and are an invaluable resource. Things like Google Tech Talks bring that resource back to the technology lover.
- Being independent of technology is something that all older successful CS guys have in common. They concentrated on theory and math throughout their careers and were able to go with the flow instead of being stuck with whatever trend language was being taught when they were in school. This also helps you keep a macro view of the industry which is another way to say you’re “marketing minded.”
It’s pretty simple to break these topics up into nice bite-sized chunks but when it comes down to it, execution is the hardest part. The first step is just keeping these topics in mind and it’s bound to influence your decisions, even if in a small way.
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