The Curiosity Advantage: Why AI Makes This the Golden Age of Learning in Tech
Why unlimited learning could be the key to thriving in tech's new landscape
Back when I was studying in college for exams or after college for jobs I always had questions that could never be answered. In college I was afraid to ask because I didn’t want to seem stupid and then when working I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to seem incompetent.
Often times the questions I have are fundamental to why something is the way it is. These types of questions I find hard to articulate well enough to get a good answer out of a person. Many times I find myself asking a question and the person responding appears to answer a completely different question. This is just how it goes when asking another person a question sometimes. They speak from their experience and mental model on how this “thing” works.
Sometimes you find a person who appears to have the same mental model as you. Technically you both are speaking the same language and its glorious. This is rare in my experience.
AI has entered the chat
Generally speaking, with AI models nowadays I have access to extraordinary amounts of knowledge all at my fingertips. No more fear of asking questions. I can spend time asking Claude or Gemini the simplest questions all day long and they simply keep providing answers without judgement.
The best part is I can give my perspective on my understanding of something and it can either confirm or deny that thinking and provide feedback as to how I should be thinking about the topic I’m asking about.
You can provide hints to these models suggesting how you like learning about a topic and ask it to put together tutorial after tutorial for you to work through your understanding.
In the past, I would go out and buy books, online courses, and more books to help me understand various technical topics. I was never able to find the book or the course to help me understand completely. I would jump around books or courses and drill into different aspects I found interesting or knew I needed to learn.
For example, when I was first starting and was applying for jobs I bought Cracking the Coding Interview. I tried so many times to sit there and read through the different sections but ultimately I’d always fail. So eventually I found more books such as Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms and Grokking Data Structures. Still though I never had someone to be there with me to help by answering all of my questions.
Now, with AI, I have that.
I can read a book or watch a video and any follow up questions I can just ask now.
I can keep asking the same question different ways from all angles to solidify my understanding. Nothing is stopping me besides myself at this point.
Unlimited learning is here
10 years ago if you could teach yourself everything in Cracking the Coding Interview you could land yourself a very nice 6 figure job at one of the big tech companies.
Unfortunately, those times are no more. Many tech companies large and small are going through layoffs. The timing of it all puts pretty much all the blame on AI. I’m not going to sit here and say that’s not true because I honestly have no clue.
But I do know the bar for those nice 6 figure jobs is rising rapidly. Some will say the grind of Leetcode is pointless or spending time interview prepping isn’t worth it anymore. It’s hopeless.
I couldn’t disagree more with that take.
For the first time in my professional career, I have the ability to learn as much as I want all for a relatively low monthly price historically speaking.
If I want to spend a day learning about distributed consensus in distributed systems, I can do that. I can ask Claude to come up with tutorials, real-world examples, or even a quiz—all to help me learn. I don’t have to go and fumble through various google searches and blog posts or pay for a course that may not even answer the questions I want to ask.
Yes, AI gets things wrong sometimes. I’m not saying blindly trust it. But now that it can provide searches alongside the results that’s even more helpful. This will only get better.
Lots of folks have pretty negative takes on working in tech right now and while I hear those folks, I also think there is tremendous opportunities for curious hard working folks to thrive.
There are so many courses online being sold that advertise or pressure one into thinking that THIS is the way to learn about whatever the thing is. This is not true anymore.
Now you can learn however best suits you.
So go and follow your technical curiosities however you’d like!
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