Comes down to how you switch gears

When studying in college, I was fascinated by technology and curious about learning about the next big wave to ride on.

Data analytics was talk of the town back then, now it’s Artificial Intelligence.

These trends come and go with time but the process of figuring out which waves to ride and which one’s to avoid is the task at hand. The college journey typically lasts 4 years, and with all external factors considered your aim should to figure out the right role to get your career started.

Joining clubs, attending workshops, and speaking to seniors was my way to learning interesting technology trends.

Figuring Out

In the early college days, explore and learn about roles and domains to build a large enough sample size to filter out what you like vs don’t. You have to go through the process and do the dirty work before you realize what works best for you and discard the rest.

As you go on the journey, you will start picking up new things and experiment with the learnings, eventually understanding what you don’t see working out in the longer run.

This process will give you the clarity to think your options through and help you make the right decisions on what role you can choose for your career.

One observation from being in the system is that, as you learn more, say you find a new programming language or software library that’s trending.

It is very easy to get carried away in the hype and get tunnel visioned into just exploring and spending hours learning that, only to eventually realize there is no adoption of the tech by the industry.

Tunnel vision here is also from the obsession with learning and discovering new ideas. But one needs to use it to their advantage of gathering the right information about the technology before investing time and energy.

Technology stacks like Flutter were very popular among college students as it gave the ability to build cross-platform apps.

But currently, Flutter is only used for very specific usecases and is not the first choice when building enterprise software.

You don’t start building an expressway before the land acquisition is 90% done for the project to begin.

Similarly, if something new excites you - learn, research, experiment, and validate the technology first before deciding to dive in head first.

Use the tunnel vision to focus and generate a deeper understanding of the domain instead of boxing yourself into a corner.

Once you use the playbook a few times, it becomes easier to switch gears effortlessly and figure out what is worth spending time on and not.

The clarity comes from exploring multiple options but keeping the goal in mind to avoid joining the cult of worshipping a role without any logic or reasoning.