Education is the best tool for oppressing others. It works very well.
I know something, you don’t, you have to depend on me. Suffer little children!
You’re #CuriousAboutData, so read on!
When communists came to power in Russia in 1917, education reform was one of the first things that they implemented. Of course, a couple of generations later they regretted their largess because it lead to their demise — but that’s a different story. Other governments took notice, and made sure that it’s increasingly difficult to obtain quality education. Not in the least by creating a culture where thinking is considered a burden. Of course, this too, proved to be short-sighted. Now we complain that there aren’t enough tech workers and innovation is stagnating.
I wonder why?
But, you know what? At BitWise we pride ourselves on being logical, so let’s take this apart:
Consider a simple premise: “The more you know, the better off you are.” You would think that everyone would agree with this — but no!
We asked over a 1000 CTOs and developers in our network. And the results were staggering.
Some claimed that it’s not even desirable to have a broad knowledge base:
— “No you do not need to know it all. I never used language X and have no need for it”
Others claimed that it’s not even possible
— “No, we cannot know it all. It takes time, practice and in-depth study.“
And so on. With all due respect, I will posit that there is no such thing as enough knowledge. Yes, there are practical limits of what we can do, but if we at least strive, opportunities will present themselves. For example, one of our developers was very interested in file structures, binary decoding, etc. She was mostly doing Python development that dealt with refactoring application logic, not even I/O streams or anything like that. But being curious, she kept working on it whenever she had a chance. Until, finally, a big day came along — a client with a database that couldn’t be backed up. All of their backups produced gibberish, and they needed to migrate to a new system … like, yesterday.
So, she got to examine the binary stream, try different encodings until the root cause was found, and she was able to construct a unicode backup for a migration to a fully unicode complaint database.
Indeed, fortune smiles on those who prepare.
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