The 10,000 Hour Rule and Solving Problems versus Seeing Connections Between Problems
John Pescatore happend to write a post - Ten Years to Get Good, Ten Minutes to Prove It - inspired by a piece on Malcom Gladwell’s new book Outliers. Since Malcolm happens to be giving one of the keynotes at the AADI Summit, it feels right to connect the dots a bit.
In his book, Malcolm highlights the 10,000 Hour Rule that says in order to excel at something you have to spend at least 20 hours a week for ten years doing it. John builds on this and mentions: “I think for the first ten years of my career I was really good at attacking and solving problems, but not so good at seeing the connections between the problems, or any patterns that could lead to ways to avoid the problems.”
It strikes me that this is a bit similar to the challenge that many of us are facing in the next generation of application development, where the focus is less on creating new discrete pieces of code – the thing that many have spent the last 10+ years of our lives doing – and more about pulling together/assembling existing discrete pieces of code into larger ’services’ – similar to John’s notion of seeing the connections between problems. This ties back to my previous SOA Failure post, where I highlighted the application development community’s unhealthy fixation on re-creating the wheel rather than re-using good code from elsewhere. Hopefully, many of you are now well into gaining 10,000 hours of experience around service oriented development and the related concepts of composition, orchestration and assembly.
Michael Blechar is leading a great set of sessions on this:
- Roadmap for Service-Oriented Development
- Analyst/User Roundtable – Best Practices in Service-Oriented Development
- Trends in Model-Driven Collaboration
1 response so far ↓
1 Pauwl Lunow // Nov 20, 2008 at 3:28 am
I agree it is similar. What is a little scary though is that those making decisions ‘after 10 years’ are relying on the views and technologies of those that have just joined the company/industry.
We’ve seen such an errosion of content- skills in IT management over the last decade that I struggle to see how many companies are going to take a decision on making the significant governance and architectural changes required to make a step-change in the right direction.
Companies without tech-savy (35-45 yr old) middle-management with strong communicative skills are going to suffer the next 2 years whilst vendors drag them into a new paradigm.
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