Agreed, it was nothing more than a glorified tweet. While I generally agree with his points, some more depth and thought would have been much more preferable.
We had a discussion about this. What is the right thing to focus on to be safe in future? Everybody knows software is eating the world and as a consequence it's eating jobs. Sooner or later, your software hand crafting job will be replaced with a software that does it better and of course cheaper. Where should we go to be on bleeding edge that software can't reach yet?
One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university. Specially if you are already a software engineer that makes a lot of money for hand coding things that seems obvious to not be a hard problem to solve.
I personally believe that the state wr are in right now is temporary. Nobody can make a living in future by coding simple web pages or CRUD backends. It's gonna get automated way more that what we can imagine today.
One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university.
Why? You need to put in significant time to do well, but are the needed resources (books, people to talk to, etc) really not available outside of a university?
My own plan, from a similar starting position, is to buy one of these[1], and start tinkering with it until I have a good set of "hard problems" I've run into. Then, read the textbooks, with a motivated eye to solving those problems. I won't necessarily solve any of the Hard Problems, but I'll hopefully get a journeyman-level ability to converse with others in the field about those problems--and from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to making friends in the field and being tossed pithy journal articles to read.
Does anyone correlate the 'luck surface area' with that recent discussion on being a sociopath in the workplace. Something along the lines of convincing your coworkers that you're doing more work than you're actually doing. No one can really pinpoint what you do. You just communicate so much that it seems that you're 'in everything'. Just subtract the doing and exponentiate the telling to result in more luck.
I really liked the 7 habits of highly overrated people [1] article that you mention, but I would also encourage people to not ascribe all of those activities to overrated people, by default.
If you read in the article he even concedes that very effective people do many of these things, which is why it is an effective cover for incompetence.
Now, I know what you’re thinking — that might actually be productive. And, well, it might be, nominally so. But do you notice that you’ve got a very tangible plan of action here and there’s been no mention of what the project actually involves? A great way to appear useful without being useful is engage heavily in an activity completely orthogonal to the actual goal.
So if the goal aligns with the plan of action and there is "overcommunication" there could well be value added.
