Recently I was thinking about a problem, for technical personnel, what is the moat?
I think the answer is usually better technology.
So what exactly do we mean when we say that one person is better than another? What is better than others?
In my opinion, one thing is that he knows more about certain technical areas than others.
Another point is that when he meets a problem, he can solve it faster than others.
Let’s analyze it.
Is knowing more than anyone else a moat?
We should look at it in stages.
If it’s the beginning of a technology field, knowing more is really a moat. Because in the early stages of development, there are a lot of knowledge, you know more knowledge than others, then you are better than others.
When a technology develops to maturity, a large number of knowledge points have been summarized and deposited, and more and more people will master these points. Even these knowledge points have been deposited into the framework.
When a knowledge point is mastered by more and more people, it means that the knowledge point is no longer rare, and his ability to prove it is very small. All he can prove is that you’re as good as anyone else.
Let’s take an example.
When calculus first came out, the number of people who mastered calculus must have been very few, and such people were rare talents.
But now, calculus is taught in every college course, and knowing calculus doesn’t prove you’re better than anyone else, not knowing calculus does prove you’re worse than anyone else.
Let’s take another technical example.
I do Android myself.
When Android was just emerging, it was a rare talent to be able to make an Android APP.
That’s because very few people knew how to develop Android apps.
Gradually, we found that it was difficult to find a job only knowing how to develop Android apps.
You need to master more knowledge, such as plug-in, such as image loading, such as the Activity startup process and so on.
I remember when I first graduated, the image loading level 3 cache was a topic that was often examined.
But what are the tests now? Is the principle of plug-in, Gradle knowledge and so on. Level 3 caching is rarely tested again.
Why is that? Because this knowledge point has been known by most people.
Knowing that doesn’t make you any better than the other candidates.
So now interview questions are more and more difficult, all kinds of principles, all kinds of hooks.
But what’s the scarier thing?
Now even plug-in, the system source code of this deeper and more low-level principle, know more and more people, online analysis of these knowledge of the article is also more and more.
So we can expect that knowledge of plugins, Gradle, etc., will no longer prove that you are much better than others.
If you don’t know these things, you are worse than others.
Having said all this, the point I want to make is that there is more knowledge here, which is essentially poor information. Using poor information as a moat is not a good choice, it is time-sensitive.
So what is our real moat?
As we said before, knowledge points can not be used as a moat, but it is a moat to learn and absorb knowledge points quickly and apply them in practice.
To put it bluntly, it is the ability to learn and solve problems.
What is the ability to learn?
When something new comes along, you can pick it up faster than others. Through learning ability, the information gap is constantly enlarged. This is the moat.
What is the problem solving ability?
Is to encounter problems, can think of what process to solve, can think of what knowledge to solve.
After all, everyone’s problem-solving process is different. If you can solve it faster than anyone else, that’s your moat.
These two abilities are essentially the use of knowledge.
Let’s think a little deeper. What’s the deeper moat?
It’s the ability to create knowledge.
What does it mean to create knowledge?
In the case of Android, the first person to do this thing with plug-ins was creating knowledge.
The first person to write a picture loading library was creating knowledge.
Same thing with the front end, the people who write React and Vue are creating knowledge.
Creating knowledge, that sounds big. So let’s analyze it.
How do you create?
First we have to find a problem that others have not solved or have not solved completely.
The fact that this is not completely resolved is key. Honestly, with the way technology is today, it’s hard to find a problem that nobody can solve.
There are many image loading libraries, but they have their own advantages. These advantages are problems that other frameworks have not solved completely.
And then we have to come up with solutions.
And this solution is the knowledge of creation.
The first person to write an image loading library must have found a problem with images loading and proposed a solution.
So we can say that the essence of knowledge creation is the ability to discover and solve problems.
Let’s think a little bit further, how do we find the problem?
It takes our sensitivity, when we have a problem, to recognize that it’s a problem, and to think, can I solve this problem?
In fact, if we think about it carefully, there are many problems in our daily life, but we ignore them.
What is the problem solving ability?
It is the ability to accumulate in the previous field and transfer over to solve existing problems.
It’s essentially analog transfer capability.
Just like the people who write image loading libraries, they’ve probably seen other areas of image loading before, maybe PC side, maybe front-end.
It’s like the invention of the automobile, essentially migrating the gasoline engine to the tricycle.
We find that the ability to solve problems is actually mentioned twice, one is to use knowledge to solve problems, and the other is to solve problems by transferring knowledge by analogy.
So to wrap up, what is the moat of a technician?
It’s the ability to learn, the ability to find problems, the ability to use knowledge to solve problems, the ability to transfer knowledge by analogy.
And then we find out that these capabilities are actually not related to technology anymore. It’s already a soft quality.
This is getting interesting.