Architect
Professional INTP
- Local time
- Yesterday 9:25 PM
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2010
- Messages
- 6,691
Got your attention. But actually it's a serious point that has been a theme of my musings on this board for some time. A trend I've noticed during my career has been the obsolescence of knowledge and being smart. The reason is that the Internet is smarter and knows more than you do. When I was hired, I was known for being an expert in these technologies, it even shows up in my job title (promotion to 'expert engineer'). That's almost meaningless now.
For nearly all of the issues I might find during development of a solution to some problem I can find an answer on the internet, usually StackOverflow. No need to be clever, which used to mean taking scarce information and making connections to find an answer (usually using intuition to fill in the gaps in knowledge). Not always, but it's a small degree which will disappear in the next 10 years with the continued exponential growth of knowledge and advanced computing.
In our hiring process, while I don't think anybody is conscious of it, we've shifted from hiring knowledgable people to people who can actually do something. We don't really care what a college hire or experienced person knows (most of the time, unless they're some world leader in the specialized stuff we do), we want to see that they can produce results. We keep rejecting these poor college hires because the kids think they just need to jump through some intellectual hoops, whereas what they really need is a well stuffed GitHub account.
So what's an INTP to do? We like to accumulate knowledge, find connections between them, and draw conclusions and heuristics. Computers already do that better than we do, as evidenced by the best human Jeopardy players being beat by a computer. So what's our role now as INTP's?
I wish I had an answer, but it's one I actively think about. I'll say that one commodity that is still highly prized is the one I indicated above; people who are passionate about something and actually create stuff. Write new software, or whatever. That's about the only skill that computers haven't taken over yet. They will, but we've got some time. Thus I think a lot about the correspondence between thought and result.
For nearly all of the issues I might find during development of a solution to some problem I can find an answer on the internet, usually StackOverflow. No need to be clever, which used to mean taking scarce information and making connections to find an answer (usually using intuition to fill in the gaps in knowledge). Not always, but it's a small degree which will disappear in the next 10 years with the continued exponential growth of knowledge and advanced computing.
In our hiring process, while I don't think anybody is conscious of it, we've shifted from hiring knowledgable people to people who can actually do something. We don't really care what a college hire or experienced person knows (most of the time, unless they're some world leader in the specialized stuff we do), we want to see that they can produce results. We keep rejecting these poor college hires because the kids think they just need to jump through some intellectual hoops, whereas what they really need is a well stuffed GitHub account.
So what's an INTP to do? We like to accumulate knowledge, find connections between them, and draw conclusions and heuristics. Computers already do that better than we do, as evidenced by the best human Jeopardy players being beat by a computer. So what's our role now as INTP's?
I wish I had an answer, but it's one I actively think about. I'll say that one commodity that is still highly prized is the one I indicated above; people who are passionate about something and actually create stuff. Write new software, or whatever. That's about the only skill that computers haven't taken over yet. They will, but we've got some time. Thus I think a lot about the correspondence between thought and result.