Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

by Serguey Shinder

A few years ago a new tool started appearing in every conversation in my field, and my first reaction was to dismiss it. I had seen hype cycles before. I told myself this was another one, that the fundamentals I already knew would outlast the fashion, and that spending time on the new thing was a distraction from real work. There was some wisdom in that caution. There was also a lot of fear wearing the costume of wisdom.

What I was actually protecting was the comfort of being good at something. I had spent years becoming competent, and the new tool threatened to reset me to a beginner. Refusing to learn it let me stay expert a little longer. Dismissal is a very effective way to avoid the humiliation of being bad at something in public.

The turn came when I watched a younger colleague, someone with a fraction of my experience, solve in an afternoon a problem that would have taken me a week. She was not smarter than me. She had simply been willing to be a beginner at the new thing while I had been busy defending my expertise at the old one. My caution had not kept me safe. It had just kept me behind.

That was a bruising thing to admit, and it changed how I think about the future of this work. I used to imagine that the goal was to accumulate knowledge, to build a fortress of things I knew that would keep me valuable. Now I think the fortress is the trap. What you know becomes the thing you defend, and defending it is exactly what stops you from learning what comes next.

So I have tried to make peace with being a perpetual beginner. Not to chase every shiny tool, some of them really are hype, but to stay willing to be bad at something new when it clearly matters. The willingness itself is the skill. Everything specific I learn will eventually expire. The capacity to start over will not.

I still feel the pull toward comfort, toward the things I am already good at, toward the quiet self-image of the experienced person who has seen it all. But I have learned to treat that pull as a signal to look closer, not further away. Whatever I am most reluctant to learn is often precisely the thing the future is asking of me.

The engineer I want to be is not the one who knows the most. It is the one who stays teachable the longest. That, I have decided, is the only expertise that does not eventually go out of date.

– Serguey Asael Shinder