I've been writing a lot recently about how people don't need to know everything, and how it's impossible to know everything. It's something I 100% stand by, and there are so many things that I don't know a lot about. So I wanted to do something different and open up the discussion about things that we aren't interested in learning.
I'll start:
VIM - I know people absolutely love VIM, but I'm super happy with my text editor set up, and don't really feel a need to overcome the VIM learning curve. Part of me does sometimes think about it, but at least for now, I'm good.
DevOps - Fun fact, my title for the first year or so of my software engineering career was "DevOps engineer" -- I didn't really do DevOps, but I can sort of navigate my way around setting up a server, and I have set up a Kubernetes cluster. That being said, the output isn't that tangible to me, and it's not something I'm super interested in diving too much deeper into that world.
Advanced math - I took Calculus in high school, and took a couple of stats classes in college, but that's really the end of my math education. I'm not super interested in diving too much further into that world, and, to be honest, I forget a lot of the stuff I have learned in the past.
Lower level programming - the more tedious process in order to build useful things in lower level languages doesn't really interest me.
Hardware - I'm not super into hardware, I like my pre-built Mac's and the world of building computers just doesn't draw me in.
There are a milion and one things I would love to learn, but I can't learn everything.
What tools or technologies are you not interested in learning?
Latest comments (104)
Exactly your points and more:
DevOps extravaganza. I learn exactly what I need to do deploy things. It's too complicated and boring to death.
.NET or anything related to.
VR and AR.
Blockchain - useless outside hype bubble.
React.
CSS
Data analysis and visualization. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love to visualize my own data (heck, I organize my financial data and display it for myself as if it was a 90s financial newspaper, just for fun; cue to my design and typography background) but I am absolutely not interested if the data is other people’s. I don’t like treating “audiences” like herds of sheep or like some thing to study. Analytics, studying users and customers, putting everyone into labels and boxes? I don’t like it. I’d rather make useful products that grow organically, instead of entertainment sugar that analyzes users like a microscope.
I think my point is, I’m not interested in user analytics.
I don't want to learn vim because back in the day I learned vi and that's enough for me :) (I used to know how to use ex and ed well too, but fortunately I can't think of the last time I was forced to resort to line at a time editors.)
I used to want to know Drupal but fortunately I no longer have to deal with anything like that professionally.
Not interested in Ruby.
No Haskell. (Tried once, briefly, broke a tooth.)
I would say nothing that never reaches the break even point between investment and increased productivity (or what ever the gain is).
The problem is you often don't know it beforehand and therefore in my opinion something you definitely want to learn is how to fold a bad hand (or skill).
I'm happy to see that you're also not interested in devops and lower level languages :) I had the same idea in mind a couple of years ago when I was building and setting up the production node.js environment at work. That led me to develop stormkit.io which was built exactly with this use case in mind: Just focus on your code, and get your production-ready environment out of the box. It's still in the alpha stage, so I'd be super happy to hear your feedback.
To answer the question asked: I'm not interested in learning anything that's documented exclusively in 1000 page PDFs. (Encountered 2 such systems at my last job and found it highly demoralizing. 😬)
On the VIM tangent…
For anyone who's in the "I'll learn VIM when I've got tons of free time and feel somehow inspired to slog through the VIM tutorial," check out vim-adventures.com! (No affiliation.)
I started the tutorial twice without finishing before stumbling on this surprisingly-entertaining game. It had 12 levels, rather than 13, at the time, and I finished them all over the course of a few days and came out with skills I thought would be forever beyond my reach!
The first 3 levels — which are free with no account creation necessary — give you a good feel for it, along with the basics needed to begin to "feel" what VIM motions can do. As a matter of principle, I generally hate to endorse products in open forums, but this one's worth making an exception as it's rare to find anything that makes learning a dry technical skill feel not just fun, but effortless.
-> Front End and UX stuff
-> TOTALLY VIM, it scares me
Networking , robotics , block chain , AI , Design
To stay on the topic though, I don't really have any desire to learn Ruby in any more depth than I already have unless there's a project or reason for me to do it, nor objective-c as I already know several c based languages and swift is slated to replace it anyway and I know enough to be able to context switch to knowing it as well as most programers in 1-3 days.
Also guys, seriously learn advanced math. The newer technologies you guys are talking about were built on pretty crazy math concepts, as your career progresses and technology does, there's not going to be a huge market for people who can do stuff we're in the process of automating.
The people on those projects automating everything make a lot of money and the reason they can is they understand these deep concepts. At scale a lot of the things you guys think are easy actually require a very good understand of pretty complex mathematical concepts and ways of thinking or your servers are going to overload no matter how many servers you throw at it.
There is nothing I have no interest in learning, and I would suggest anyone with that attitude reconsider that position.
I'm a senior software engineer, have managed a team before, have literally taken servers in a company that was failing and reworked everything to make the company profitable again and helped the owner sell it as their tech representative, seen and helped manage a few buyouts, have done software engineer and dev ops positions, front end, back end, networking, security, etc. Pretty much full stack developer that has worked at Amazon and Booz Allen Hamilton, multi-nationals that didn't start in the US, startups, you name it.
There is nothing I have learned in my career that I regretted learning that down the road I didn't need.
You really should learn all of the things mentioned, especially if it's something you can learn to advance what you can do at your job. There isn't something I've come across that I didn't at least dabble in and research when I came across it, I would suggest even if you don't have the time to really delve into it, at least get marginally proficient enough to know what it is.
If you come across it, odds are you will again in my experience.
Just my advice, I've been in the industry for over 10 years and academia in paid positions at least 5 before that.
Salesforce. I've done two database transitions into Salesforce, and that's enough for me.
JOOMLA > Will always use WordPress.
Lower level programming
Analytics
Could probably think of so many other things but these are what immediately spring to mind.
Don't hate me Ali, but python. Nothing against it, but feels like it fills the same niche as some other languages I know and I've got other things I wanna do :)