As a software engineer I have adapted to the world turning upside down every couple of years and having to learn new concepts and technologies. However, I have been noticing other fields struggling to adapt as things change in a faster scale.
For example, some researchers have pointed out that the number of papers about ADHD increases exponentially every year. However, most mental health professionals, at least in my area, seem to be severily outdated, often using information that has been debunked within the last 10-20 years.
So, I was wondering if other fields are affected and how they are adapting?
Edit: Bonus question, assuming a 40hr week (a luxury for most), how much time out those 40hrs would you need to spend on education?
Well, I used to have an area of expertise… Then we adopted a kid.
Kids are hard. Kids who had years of neglect and trauma… can be a lot harder. I love him very much, but he takes up so much of my time and energy, I just don’t have any time for my own stuff any more.
Also, my field (IT) has gotten weird as computers have gotten weird. Nobody uses computers any more, they use “devices”. And these devices all suck. They’re hard (or impossible) to actually back up, you can’t deploy software to them in an organized way, they’re a security nightmare, and the interface just isn’t as easy to use as a freaking mouse and keyboard.
And if you want to talk about actual computers, those suck more every year too. Oh the hardware is improving by the day, but the software hasn’t been cooperative in years. Always online operating systems, fake settings menus to keep the user away from the real settings menus… Actually, nevermind, I don’t even want to talk about OSs, they make me too angry.
And then there’s all the software packages that would rather be services than what they actually are, a product. Poor Adobe, just not filthy rich enough yet…
Anyway, it gets harder to do IT as computers get shittier, and I am falling behind, because I hate it.
As kids get older they consistently show that parents, even enthusiastic adoptive parents, are falling behind. Enjoy your kid while they are young and they will enjoy you when they are older. Let the OSs and computers fall behind, trying to keep up with the kid is far more important.
If possible, do like I do: steer away from the shitty parts of IT. Sure, I’m falling behind, but only in regards to tech I do not want to deal with.
The result: Niche skill set revolving around stuff I like doing, and I’m damn good at it. Pays pretty well too.
Yeah, I’m doing DevOps but only DevOps. Only builds. Only Jenkins. At least I do best practices for Java, JavaScript and Python and done interesting AppSec stuff but they all do the same thing.
When I first started here, I was getting into some interesting stuff with AWS, but then they hired another me and we over-specialized