In 2004, Paul Graham wrote an essay on the perks of picking a less-popular language.

Some quotes are clever; some only superficially so. Often, we are so awed by a statement that we don’t ever question its veracity. Take, Betteridge’s law of headlines, for example. The maxim assets that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a “no.” A straightforward analysis points that the law only applies 25% of the times. Probably, the originator didn’t consider genuine uses of having a question as a headline.

It took me some time to get my first decent job, not because I lacked technical skills but I held myself back for no good reason other than making foolish assumptions about what employers are looking for. I settled for a shitty job and was spending nights and weekends to enrich my Github contribution map. Little did I know that people at the top of hiring pipeline have little interest in m code.

About a year back, Mark Cuban remarked that people without AI skills “are going to be a dinosaur within three years.” Mark is not alone in believing that AI takeover is imminent. I have heard similar opinions from people around me just as often. Some are even frantically picking up MOOC courses on Machine Learning lest they become unemployable.

In the mid-1980s Daniel Chambliss, a sociology professor from Hamilton College, endeavored to demystify excellence, defined by him as ”consistent superiority of performance.” His quest lead him to study “competitive swimming” as it offered unambiguous measures of performance (races won, fastest swim). Obviously, it’d be a lot harder to rank pianists, actors, and writers. Over the next six years, he tracked, interviewed, and analyzed around one hundred and twenty swimmers of various levels of ability.