Learn From History

I've just spent a week in the UK visiting the Redgate HQ with my fellow advocates. I'm really blessed to get to work with such a great bunch of people. A couple of the conversations we had stuck with me and I'd like to share them here.

Sitting in the midst of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK, history is inevitably on your  mind. After all, the first bridge across the Cam there was Roman. The University is just a little shy of 900 years old. The colleges, churches (including one with the Washington family crest), and other buildings feel literally old. Now, we weren't discussing actual history. We talked about the history of data platforms. Lots of jokes cracked about the dead platforms that many of us had worked on, our own history with Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. Where those platforms have come from and are headed. It's fascinating because they've all evolved quite a lot over the years. New functionality, whole new ways of dealing with old problems, even the complete elimination of old problems through new technology. A lot has happened to all these platforms over the last 20-30 years.

So, that was one conversation.

Another conversation we had was about you. OK, maybe not you, the person in particular currently reading this, but you, our peers, our customers, the people we help out and the people we learn from. To a degree, and yes, there's a lot more subtlety to this than I'm going to use here, you all kind of break down into two camps. The smaller camp is the one that's curious. How do things works? How do I apply them? Can I put this new technique to work? Does it apply to me? Even if I reject it, I understand it, and I'm making an informed choice. The larger camp, I'm sorry to say, isn't all that curious. They've put in a year, 18 months, maybe even two years, learning their data platform. And then, they've repeated that same year, over and over. You'll see these people all the time. They've got 10 maybe 20 years of experience... on paper. In reality though, it's one year of experience multiplied 20 times.

I'm going to ask you straight up. Which camp do you think you're in?

If you're in that second, larger camp, I want to encourage you to first, see that. Then, do something about it. I'm going to continue to be blunt. You know who is literally scared that AI is going to replace them? The people who haven't been learning. The people who don't see that, while history doesn't repeat, it sure does rhyme really good. They've seen technologies come and go. They've learned them, then learned more, then dug in as necessary. Yeah, they've discarded, or been discarded, technologies and techniques. They've got 5, 10, 20, more, years of true growth where they've learned from history. They're not scared of AI, the cloud, Extended Events, PostgreSQL, or anything else. Why? Because they've learned from history. Yeah, sure, a lot of that is their own history, sure. However, if you're the one that's been sitting on that one year of experience and stacking it on top of the exact same year of experience, doing stuff because, and man I hate this phrase, WE'VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY, then yeah, maybe, just maybe, you should be a little afraid of , cause yeah, it's likely to kick you to the curb.

However, you don't have to let it. Learn from history. Get out there and ride the waves. See the rhythm. See the patterns. See the rhyming and take advantage of it. I'm not saying it's easy. It's not. It's actually pretty hard. However, building that knowledge, those skills, that understanding, that's what's going to allow you to have long, storied, career. Learn from history.

Grant Fritchey

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