Something I’ve noticed about the computer science field, particularly in industry: we’re often handed a piece of technology, we’ve never seen or used before, such as a new programming language or framework; asked to learn it, use it, and produce a production quality implementation.
This is particularly exaggerated in my field as a contractor. I have to be able to be able to move into a contract and accomplish a task given the resources and infrastructure already in place for that client. At the OSL I had to learn Chef, ChefSpec, Inspec, Openstack, Terraform, and general Linux sysadmin type tasks. At my current company Tag1 Consulting I’ve had to learn Ansible, Molecule, Solr/Zookeeper clustering, AWS, Docker, some Drupal, Kubernetes, Helm, and others. Specs are often sparse and consist of, “Hey I need you to accomplish ‘x’ using ‘y'”. Internally I’m thinking, “Cool I don’t know how to do ‘x’ and I’ve never even heard or ‘y'”, but externally I have to go, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but I’m sure I can figure it out. I’m on it”.
I consider myself very fortunate to be working at a place with a very healthy culture. I’m not expected to know everything right away, It’s ok to say, “I don’t know that”, I’m given a lead time to familiarize myself, and while I’m largely expected to be independent and self-sufficient, I’m surrounded by some of the best in the world at their specific area and are always willing to unblock you and teach, given you’ve done your research.
While this can sound stressful and intimidating, and it can be, it’s an amazing opportunity to get paid to learn and gain more skills. It also allows me to work on what I think is the number one most important skill to have in computer science, and that’s the ability to learn. My early CS professor was amazing and very much stressed the importance of being able to read documentation and figure things out through trial and error.
