Plateaus
From Bartelby.com, a Plateau is "A relatively stable level, period, or state."
I learned about Plateaus early because I grew up thinking I was going to play guitar for a living. Well ok, I'm not sure how I thought I was going to balance it, but I knew I ALSO wanted to be an Engineer. But musicians as a group, I think we all know plateaus. We get to some point in our learning and seem to stall out. Forward motion stops. We don't get any worse, we just don't seem to get better. The longer we stay in the plateau, the worse it becomes, and some people drop out at that point thinking they've reached the end of their ability.
With music, I found I could get past a plateau by getting a new book, or listening to a new artist on record (yeah... I'm THAT old). Maybe even listen to someone outside your instrument... for instance, even though I'm a Jazz Guitarist, I listened to a LOT of Jimmy Smith on the Hammond B-3 organ.
So how does this apply to my technical world?
I think we reach plateaus technically as well... I sure do. I think we can get a plateau forced on us by working for a living in an area that is different from the one you're chasing. It's very hard to stay on top of a moving target when you can only shoot at it one or two hours a day! Even if the "show-up job" as a buddy of mine calls it is reasonably new technologically and reasonabaly fulfilling, if you're trying to chase another technology outside work, it's tough. And yeah, I'm talking about me. I do MS Access 2000/2003 out to Oracle, and .NET 1.1/2.0 Web applications in C# out to Oracle all day. I'm having to do a lot, but it's last year's technology and there's NO WAY that they're ever going to need Silverlight. VS2005 and .NET 2.0 is NEW!
I found Silverlight 1.0 somewhat easy to pick up and write about because the scope was small... it wasn't that there wasn't that much you could do with it, it was just a smaller footprint of knowledge to get your head around. But even then, as articles and applications got larger, the time between them got larger as well. Now with Silverlight 2, yikes ... all the .NET stuff comes flying out of the woodwork, and it's not just Silverlight anymore, it's all the stuff I have no knowledge of because I have no need to apply it in my 9 hours-a-day job.
So it's really, really easy to coast along on the plateau... even though you're in the thick of things in some respects. But the plateau is bad because as we all know, steady-state doesn't last forever. You have to move up or move aside.
I choose to move up, how about you?
Stay in the 'Light!
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posted @ Wednesday, May 07, 2008 10:36 AM