I’ve seen this video today
…and it made me think a lot about my life and my career. Most of the technologies I’ve studied in a classroom are now obsolete. Or were already obsolete at the time I was studing them. It’s very morale damaging knowing that you’re studing something just to pass an exam and that you’ll never use that knowledge ever again. But I wasn’t discouraged by the educational system and I’ve spent a lot reading and experimenting on my own and that’s how I’ve got a pretty good programmer. Really! I was always appreciated by my work colleagues and considered to be the guy that they could always ask for help. But still, I can’t even write a louzy string comparison in ASM without using Google. That’s not because I didn’t want to learn that or that I consider ASM knowledge to be useless and obsolete like other people do, but because there is simply to much information out there and not enough time to learn it all. And it multiplies at an ever increasing rate. Ajax as we know it -- with the XMLHttpRequest object -- was coined in 2005, less than 4 years ago. Now it’s impossible to find a job description in the web programming field that doesn’t include Ajax. Today’s experiments will be next year’s job requirements. Our generation will always have to adapt to world that’s changing like never before.
So I’ve decided to expand my education and skills and I’ve made a list with things I want to do this year:
- improve my knowledge of the Zend Framework -- the target is to pass the Zend Framework Certified Engineer exam
- improve my knowledge of the Linux operating system -- the target is to pass the Comptia Linux+ exam
- improve my command of the English language -- the target is to pass pass the Cambridge exam
- learn a little bit of German -- no ambitious target here as I can’t really set a target, now that my level in German is below zero
- get my bachelor degree -- after all these long years, it’s about time
- take a race driver course -- a hobby for now, but one can never know what the future holds;)
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to complete the list, but I’ll try hard and I’m going to look back to this post on the 31 of December and see how much I’ve accomplished. And of course, start a new list with “to-learn”s for 2010.
Today I have passed an exam of which knowledge I am sure that I will never use in any of my future jobs. And I have done this pretty often in my 3 years that I have spent on the Automatic Control and Computers faculty’s benches. The few courses that really can be considered useful from a job perspective view only contain the basics even if I feel that there is much more time for newer and cooler stuff to be included in the presentations. But the Romanian educational system is like a big dump right in the middle of the road: we all know that it stinks but nobody tries to clean it while this thing is still possible (in a more sarcastic way while the brains of the kids that finish high-school still have potential).
I am a bit frustrated that I really do not have a role model for my aspiring career as an IT Engineer because all of the great minds that have succeeded until now have had a lot of darkness around for their star to shine but in our times I feel that there is plenty of light almost everywhere.
So what remains now? I think using my intuition and following a certain path that looks inspiring for the future and plenty of luck. To all of us!
I saw this video for the first time on TeacherTube.com, and I presume the one you found is actually a reiteration of that one. I like better the former because of the background music:
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=799aaa845e1c2e8a762b
You’re so right. However, with all these new concepts that appear every nanosecond, there are all the former concepts that people are either neglecting or completely forgetting. It is true that by the time we’re 38 we’ll have had 14 jobs, but from then on the probability we change jobs also decreases exponentially. All the things “on the edge” of the “new wave” are pushing knowledge and technology forward, but we still have to contend with all the things we’ve learned so far, as well. We move faster, but we don’t really grow. The future, I believe, is in the growth, in the ability to absorb all this information, rather than (I dare say) the old way, which was to always stay one step in front of others.
Regarding the video itself, it seemed obsolete from the very beginning. The music is several years old, the concept of “nation” and the children born where is completely meaningless today, while the comparison of people and illegally downloaded songs is just as pointless as talking about 1000$ in a world where there are cheap computers that exceed the computational speed of the entire human race.