Knowledge is overrated

What should we focus on instead?

I remember learning to code in the early 2000s. I had one book I read maybe 50 times until it dissolved into a packet of pages. I didn’t know English, and I didn’t have access to the Internet, which was the standard at the time.

Knowledge was costly. Not everybody could get it. Having it was an asset.

Google and GPT

In a decade, broadband internet became common and cheap enough that nearly everybody could get it and Google whatever they needed. This was the first time knowledge had been devalued.

If you knew how to find information, you didn’t need it in your brain.

We discovered LLMs in 2023. AI can answer any question, and it will give us the knowledge we need. The release of OpenAI is the single event that wiped any value out of “knowing”.

Today, you don’t need to know how to find knowledge - you only need to ask questions.

Both Google and AI radically shifted how knowledge work works.

If not knowledge, then what?

When knowledge was scarce, finding a job as an engineer was easy. All I had to say was, “I can code,” and I got five offers. Looking at the market today, knowing how to code is required, but it has little to no value.

As the technical skills lost value, two areas have been pushed up in the rankings.

First are soft skills like communication and leadership. In my first jobs, it didn’t matter if someone was rude or a solo player as long as they could deliver the code. Today, if you communicate your values and ideas better, you win with those who can’t.

Second is what I call understanding or implementation. The accessibility and amount of knowledge became problems on their own. Filtering and deciding what knowledge is relevant at any given time became the most essential skill for everybody to learn.

Today's gold is knowing what you must learn and how to apply it.

How can you learn it?

Both soft skills and understanding have one thing in common - they are unteachable.

That kind of skill can be learned only by practice and feedback. It’s like learning how to ride a bike. You can read all the books, but they won’t teach you how to balance on the bike.

The only way is experience. For software engineering, which is also a soft skill, you need to spend time building applications and systems and figure out what worked and what didn’t. For communication skills, you need to get out and speak with people.

There are two ways to gain experience.

Do it yourself

It’s an easily accessible path. You trade the time you spend on side projects and exercises for the understanding of what you do. The downside is that a day has only 24 hours, and deciding what to focus on can be challenging.

Do it with others

You can gain experience by speaking and working with people who have done it before. This can be a mentoring program with other developers or a community you join to exchange your experience with others. This can save you years of figuring out what works and what doesn’t because someone with more experience made this choice in the past, and they know the results.

Doing it yourself will get you started; doing it with others will keep you going.

Less knowing more doing

I’ve cut off some of the knowledge I consume. I no longer need to validate whether I know design patterns; I must practice how and when I use them.

This paradigm shift is also one of the reasons why I moved out of the individual contributor role. I bet that soft skills, leadership, communication, and experience in how and when to use technology will help me more in the future than the raw skill of writing code.

It is a bet because I don’t know the future. It’s a pattern I notice in the industry. Noticing patterns and trends is another exciting skill, but that's for another article.

The Engineering by Doing Community

That’s why I binned the last three months of work I spent creating a course.

I realised it won’t deliver the value that’s needed.
I realised I needed to take a different route to teach what I felt was necessary.

That’s how the idea of a community has been born.

It’s a perfect platform to practice leadership, communication and engineering with other engineers. It’s a place to share your experiences and learn from other’s mistakes. It’s where you can attend interactive workshops that get you to do things instead of just watching videos on a screen.

The community is early in the making, and I need your help.

I’m gathering information on what you’d like to gain from it and who would be interested in joining. I’ve created a 5-minute survey, and I would be grateful if you could give me your feedback.

Thank you!