Since time immemorial, humans have been specialists: hunter/gatherer, farmer/artisan, and so on. This arrangement is labour-efficient and cost-effective. And such specialisations naturally occur in intellectual fields, too: poet/musician, philosopher/practitioner, etc.
I noticed, though, that, at least amongst the intellectual pursuits, once an academic or a practitioner reaches the highest level of his specialisation, he, as a matter of course, had accumulated sufficient amount (at least an undergraduate level) of knowledge and skills in the proximate fields. For instance, Ansel Adams, not only mastered the artistic aspects of photography, he also was proficient in scientific aspects thereof—material science, photographic chemistry, optical physics, camera mechanics, light-sensing electronics, etc.—as well as authoring books on photography. And a licensed constitutional lawyer possesses at least the law-school-level knowledge of other areas of law. Likewise, a licensed radar engineer at least knows how the power grid works.
So, it irks me that #IT practitioners today refuse to glance at closely related subject matters. All the interviewees want to be employed as Data Scientist / AI Architect, but they know nothing of OS, drivers, file systems, networks, graphics, compilers, programming paradigms, or hardware architecture—not even statistics and AI algorithms!
I once interviewed a computer scientist who got a PhD from an accredited state university, who claimed to have "specialised in CNNs". This person explained, with alacrity, the operation of the CNN, but threw a blank stare when enquired about the denotation of the term "convolution".
How did we let this happen....
amen zwa, esq.
npub1pj…fay94
2025-12-26 16:55:07 UTC
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2025-12-26 16:55:07 UTCEvent JSON
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