On Accumulating Knowledge at 25 Years In
At some point in a long career, your relationship with learning changes.
Early on, everything is acquisition. You read voraciously, take courses, earn certifications, absorb everything available. The world is larger than you are, and the job is to close the gap as fast as possible.
Later — and I am not sure exactly when this shift happens — the nature of the learning changes. You still acquire new information, but you spend as much time integrating and revising as you do acquiring. New information gets placed in relation to what you already know, which means your existing knowledge structure matters more. You can absorb new things faster precisely because you have more to connect them to.
What this feels like from the inside: I can read a paper or a technical post now and immediately locate where it fits relative to things I have encountered before. That is useful. The danger is that the existing structure can filter out genuinely novel things — ideas that do not fit anywhere get discarded faster than they should.
The remedy, I think, is to keep encountering people earlier in their careers. They have fewer filters. They ask the questions you stopped asking because you assumed the answer. Some of those questions turn out to be good questions that you had incorrectly filed away as settled.
The PhD is partly about this. Returning to a context where you are explicitly a student, where the expected stance is inquiry rather than expertise, where you are supposed to not know things — this is useful as a corrective. It is uncomfortable in familiar ways. That discomfort is probably the point.
There is also something about the difference between breadth and depth. At 25 years in, I have significant breadth across a wide area of technology and organizational practice. I have depth in some places — cloud architecture, FinOps, enterprise AI adoption — that came from sustained attention over time.
What I notice is that breadth without depth is pattern recognition without understanding. You can identify that something is like something else you have seen, but you cannot reason about the underlying mechanisms. Depth in one area gives you a template for what understanding actually feels like — which makes it easier to identify when you are at the breadth level versus the depth level in other areas.
I do not have a tidy conclusion. The observation is just that learning at 25 years in is not the same activity as learning at 2 years in, and the mental model of "accumulating knowledge" probably needs revision for the later career. It is less like filling a container and more like cultivating a garden — things grow in relation to other things, and the composition matters as much as the quantity.
What that means practically, I am still working out.
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Working on this in production?
We do this work directly alongside engineering teams — architecture review, migration, and hands-on enablement.