flâneur

90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $0 - by Kent Beck

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First, I do not have the answer for which skills are in the 90% & which are in the 10%. (I’ll tell you why I concluded that split in a second.) We are back in Explore territory in 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract terms. The only way to find out is to try a little bit of a lot of ideas. Second, why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become (economically) worthless? I’m extrapolating wildly from a couple of experiences, which is what I do. A group of us did a word-smithing exercise yesterday. I took a sentence that was semantically correct & transformed it into something punchy & grabby. I did it through a series of transformations. Someone said, “What this means is XYZ,” and I said, “Just write that.” Then I replaced a weak verb with a stronger one—”would like to” became “crave”. Having just tried ChatGPT, I realized ChatGPT could have punched up the same sentence just as well & probably more quickly. Anyone who knows to ask (and there is a hint about the remaining 10%) could get the sa

I tweeted about this yesterday & it blew up: https://twitter.com/KentBeck/status/1648413998025707520?s=20 I wanted to expand on this a bit. First, I do not have the answer for which skills are in the 90% & which are in the 10%. (I’ll tell you why I concluded that split in a second.) We are back in Explore territory in 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract terms. The only way to find out is to try a little bit of a lot of ideas. Second, why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become (economically) worthless? I’m extrapolating wildly from a couple of experiences, which is what I do. A group of…

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