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Nothing You Learn is Useless
Just yesterday, I found this essay which was written by Rob Pike from Bell Labs back in 2000. The main point of the essay is how systems software research had become pretty irrelevant over the years, as the computing community at large became content with the computing standards they already got and stopped pushing further for systems software research.
In the section about orthodoxy, Pike wrote:
Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination.
Upon reading that line, I remembered a relatively recent discussion I had when catching up with a friend from my undergraduate years.
I told him some updates about what I’ve been up to in the past few years, which included my canceled plans to pursue a PhD as I started a habit of reading one paper per day late in December 2020. I felt that the act of reading the papers itself might have given me what I was looking for when thinking of pursuing a PhD. He responded by telling me that pursuing a PhD might be pretty useless for a practitioner, and I can see the reasoning behind that while also not agreeing with the argument as he seemed to have drawn a line between “useful” studying and “useless” studying.
I’m a firm believer that nothing you learn will ever be useless. At the very least, it will add more perspectives you can use when approaching problems.
For us software engineers, there are indeed things that are more obviously useful to study which has clear applications in the real world, such as popular programming languages and frameworks. But as we face more problems both at work and in life, many of those problems might not be solvable with your Java programming skills (if your Java skills are even relevant to the said problems).
The variety of perspectives you can use and the range of your imaginative capabilities, however, will be relevant regardless of the problems you’re facing. I think it’s highly unfortunate that many people don’t develop this kind of abilities as much as they could, given how important it is for general problem-solving, producing art, and many other things in life.
Not that I can put the blame on them alone, as most people are brought up in environments where seeing things from certain perspectives might be considered a taboo and could potentially get them into trouble. Especially in some regions where free speech and new ideas are seen as a threat by those in power.
So to begin this year, I’d like to remind myself (and others who might encounter this writing) by repeating what I told computer science freshmen in my university back in 2019 as an alumnus:
Nothing you learn is useless, it’s just whether you can come up with ways to make it useful.
And sometimes in order to be able to come up with ways to make it useful, you need to learn something else to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.