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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Targetted Skills Acquisition Versus Free Range Chickens
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The web site was created after the launch of the book "Ship It!" and discusses issues from Continuous Integration to web hosting providers.
I've had this floating around in my head for a while. It all got started after someone told me that they though conferences were a waste of time. In this person's opinion you never come away learning enough to be useful. The learning is only skin deep and you learn things you shouldn't try to integrate at your day job anyway. If the course is on Spring and your company is using Struts, you've just split the mindshare and possible diverted your project.
This point of view is what I call Targetted Skills Acquisition. Learn only what you need to get through next week. When you need to learn Hibernate, go learn it then. Buy a book, go to a class, or just download something and get to work.
On the other side of the fence, we find Free Range Chickens. A free range chicken tends to browse around, learning a bit over here and a bit over there. They do tend to waste an lot of time learning things that they don't need to know. Most of the tools and technologies chickens learn are never used.
When a problem is encountered, who can solve it the quickest? The chicken can. Someone who browses a wide variety of technologies will immediately know what category of technology can be used to solve a problem. A targetted personality will have to research the problem before they understand how to attack it. However, the chicken has been "wasting" time all along, learning lots of other bits they never use.
When solving a computational intensive problem, a chicken might look to a grid or a distributed solution because they've read about grids and are familiar with the concepts even though they've never used them before.
The targetted skills person isn't familiar with ideas like grids, so they spend a lot of time trying to tune their code to run as fast as it can on a single machine. It's a very traditional approach that prevents the application from scaling to a true enterprise solution.
Another factor to consider is that a chicken who learns about both Struts and Spring is more qualified to evaulate both and understand which one solves their problem better. If you are ignorant of the strengths of alternatives, you can't make an educated choice about the technology. This is why targetted skill types so often pick the wrong technology for a problem. It drives a good chicken crazy just watching it happening.
What is the correct approach?
I am a Free Range Chicken through and through, but I work with some very smart and effective people who are completely Targetted Skills Acquisition.
|'ve seen times in my life when I wonder if a more focused approach wouldn't have served my employer better. Would we have turned out product faster if I had been more targetted? I don't know.
But I also have seen many targetted skills people completely miss the boat with their technology choices. Their lack of broad exposure causes them to re-invent the wheel poorly instead of using a simple, existing solution. They are ignorant of industry best practices so they don't use them.
A few years ago I spoke to an "industry veteran" at the top of his game. This person had more than a decade of software experience but had never heard of MVC. He wasn't dumb- in fact, just the opposite. He understood the concept and it's benefits immediately when I showed it to him. He just hadn't been exposed to it before. He's a very smart person, but extremely targetted. And no, he wasn't coding assembly or device drivers. He was able to use the idea to do his job better.
It's not that a Free Range Chicken type is any smarter than a Targetted Skills Acquisition person. It's that they are more broadly educated.
So, what's the balance? How do we both stay educated and effective?
How much do you strive for targetted learning versus browsing across the free range? The fact that you are reading a blog tells me that you have chicken tendencies. :)
How, as a company, do we encourage both ideas? I'm thinking this is something that Google's policy of letting everyone spend 20% of their time on an independent project might address.
I'm struggle with this topic every day. I wonder what types of solutions others have found?
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