<story><title>Expiring vs. permanent skills</title><url>https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-permanent-skills</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nayuki</author><text>The article was about soft skills (a.k.a. interpersonal skills), but I most clearly see the distinction between expiring vs. permanent skills in my field of study, computer science + software development.&lt;p&gt;When I look at what&amp;#x27;s hot - in people&amp;#x27;s blogs, in bootcamp classes, and in what people like to boast about - I see stuff like the React framework and Node.js and MongoDB. Having been in the industry long enough, I&amp;#x27;ve watched these top trends change every few years.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, what I learned in university is all the unpopular stuff but that which underpins the technologies we use today. For example: Mathematical proofs, regular languages and automata, time complexity, computability, balanced trees, assembly language, recursion, pointers, declarative rules, SQL, various subsystems of operating systems, etc. This stuff gets mentioned a lot less in popular discourse, but I find that my knowledge in these areas accumulate over time instead of going out of date with each new fad. Moreover, I find that this set of knowledge continues to help me understand and work with new things that come out in this field.</text></comment>
<story><title>Expiring vs. permanent skills</title><url>https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-permanent-skills</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gchamonlive</author><text>I am kinda experiencing this in my journey learning cloud solutions.&lt;p&gt;When I first started two years ago, all AWS solutions were really interesting and I was deeply hooked. Managed systems were the way to go. And that is explainable. We sysadm all lived the hassle of maintaining live production  systems, and the thought of delegating all this maintenance while focusing on the core functionality is quite seductive.&lt;p&gt;Many caveats arise, though. Integration although native in AWS is not without its inherent complexity. Costs are opaque. Performance is sometimes subpar. And when something breaks it can take a while to debug a proprietary, closed application, not to mention when you come across an actual cloud framework bug or downtime.&lt;p&gt;I was painstakingly rediscovering the flexibility of self-managed systems. Yes, there is more maintenance work, but the core skills related to managing your own cluster of computers is timeless, while tying yourself to a vendor or framework is a gamble that can bite you hard in the long run.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am not advocating against using cloud solutions. The ideal scenario is something between managed and unmanaged solutions, the best of both worlds, but that has to be studied in a case by case basis</text></comment>