The 10,000 hour rule and computers

Posted by Wonder

December 2, 2009

Taking a break yesterday from the mindboggling task of installing a shipping module that actually works in OSCommerce, I watched Noah Everett, Founder of TwitPic, give the keynote address at the first OpenBeta. Since this all happened last year, old news to most of you but I missed the whole OpenBeta thing (which I think is great).

Anyway, he expounded on the 10,000 hour rule from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which I was also unfamiliar with. Turns out that Gladwell says you need to practice something for 10,000 hours before you become a master.

Whoah! Do you realize that if you are talking about an average work week and year, that’s five years? Yep, 5 years.

O.K., so it’s going to take me 5 years to get comfortable with PHP? How’s that gonna work in computerville? In five years PHP will probably have been replaced by AJAX or Ruby or the next best thing we haven’t even heard about yet.

And, since I think I’d like to become proficient in all 3 of the foregoing, it’s going to take me 15 years? I don’t think so, I don’t even plan on being that old.

Nope, I don’t think we can apply the 10,000 hour rule to computers or old people. Sorry, Maxwell. Just ain’t plausible in my world.

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