“Invest in yourself, not in your job.”

I appreciated this random Hacker News comment:

“Work harder on yourself than at your job. Invest in yourself, not in your job.”

The idea is, don’t spend your energy on your current job stupidly, instead spend that effort trying to find a better job, or learning skills that are more valuable, in keeping yourself relevant, etc.

A couple years ago I wrote about the difference between being good at the job vs. good at the company. And a year before that, I wrote about how learning a technology you don’t need right now is a waste of time. Lately I’ve been thinking that the same goes for learning something you won’t need after right now.

Lately I’ve been doing a round of stay interviews and one of the questions I ask is: “What are you learning that you don’t want to learn?” The answer is often “nothing” which worries me, because I think the answer should be something company-specific and non-transferrable.

Things like “how to debug a failed build in our monolith” or “how to extend our homegrown redis tooling” probably won’t help be paying off in two years or five years or ten years. Rather, compounding growth from skills that do transfer is what made all of the people we idolize as effective as they are.

And yeah, obviously you have to learn those things to succeed in the role you have right now. But we shouldn’t aim to become experts in them. We should learn them just enough, then move on and spend those diminishing returns on skills that’ll still be paying dividends years from now.