Five Decades In, the Skill Is Knowing What to Ignore

I was born in the 70s, raised in the 80s, and I've now worked across five decades, two centuries, two millenniums. I'm still in my 50s and still shipping. The reason isn't that I kept up with everything — it's that I got good at deciding what was worth keeping up with.

That's the part nobody tells you about a long tech career. The field doesn't reward the person who learns every new thing. It rewards the person who can look at a new thing and correctly decide: this is a wave, or this is noise.

The technologies come and go. Floppy disks gave way to hard drives, then the cloud. Desktop apps became web apps became mobile apps. Mainframes, client-server, SOA, microservices. Every few years the hot new thing arrived with the same pitch — learn it or be left behind. Most of them were right. Most of them are gone now.

The people who lasted aren't the ones who mastered any single framework. They're the ones who learned something portable: how to think about a system, how to decide under uncertainty, how to lead people through change. Those don't go stale.

The trap is treating every new thing as equal. Every week there's a new language, a new framework, a new paradigm shift. Chase them all and you drown; chase none and you're obsolete. The skill is in the middle — knowing which new thing is durable and which is a fad. AI is the current test case, and it's a real wave. But even within AI, the triage continues.

If I had to hand one piece of advice to the version of me starting out: don't optimize for knowing the most. Optimize for knowing what to ignore.

The field-notes version is on WanderingCTO.

Think this argument fits your event? Tell me about the room — the calendar is selective.