We’ve all heard that life / business / progress are moving faster “these days” than ever before. This feels true to me (in the positive sense, I am no Luddite), but I am also leery of how easily each generation becomes convinced that it invented newness, change, and youth.
On the topic of technical design innovation, though, we are obviously living in an era of very rapid progress. Here is a great example:
The question this raises for me, and that it should raise for you, if you are a field which is at all technical and competitive, is whether you are keeping up with the pace of the world around you. Compared to three years ago, is your work product (code, process, design, attention to detail, vigor) obviously better? How about the next three years?
Our company is still using the very first version of Toplink (before sold to Oracle) 😛
So cannot really imagine “better” if some of our concerns are not address… 😛
The question is not whether your inputs (the products you use, the place you work, etc.) are getting better; the question (to ask yourself) is whether your *outputs* are getting better. Of course, to achieve the latter, you may need to adjust / upgrade the former.
I feel like my ability to concentrate has gone down significantly over the past several years. (As an aside, TDD seems to be one of the few things that helps me focus.) I’m not exactly sure what to attribute this to.
Having done network security for much of the past 7 years, I now look at system admin positions, and find that most of them require much more specialized knowledge than they used to. That makes it a lot harder to find a new job that’s a good fit.
So while I spend a lot of personal time trying to keep up with a lot of different technologies, I feel like I’m still falling behind.
The tools we have today are a little better, but not enough to help offset the pace of technology.
I stumbled across this slideshow on “The Future of Work”, it seems relevant:
http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/the-future-of-work-2361479