13.7 billion years later

Your Professional Half Life

The term half-life is commonly known as the mathematical and scientific description of exponential or gradual decay and comes from the slightly longer term “half-life period” which has origins back to 1907*.

On my drive in to work today I was thinking about applying this principle to professions and/or different jobs. Working with the web, it is necessary to put aside time each day to read blogs / news sources just to stay remotely in sync with whats happening. It is a demanding profession in this respect. Going away for two or three weeks with no internet access can leave you feeling you’ve got a lot to catch up on. As a web developer you are not going to suffer that much from such a short time period but what about one, two or three years?

I want to define professional half-life as

The point in time in which negative effects in either knowledge or practice have occurred which have been caused by a period of absence from the role in question.

In web development it would be possible to notice degradation in both more generic practical areas like forgetting how to touch type, or remembering how to print screen in OSx to very specific knowledge like browser specific CSS rules and the finer points of an apache http.conf file for a production box. Your job’s half-life is concerned with not only remembering what you knew before, but also catching up with the things you didn’t know.

It would be difficult to give an actual time for professional half-life but if we look at a range of jobs we can classify them into at least 3 categories. Here are some quick examples.

Short Half-Life – Engineers, programmers, scientists, web developers.
Medium Half Life- Human resource managers, account handlers, police / fire service
Long Half Life – Hairdressers, refuse collectors, gardeners, receptionists

So what job do you do and what is its half-life ?

* (John Ayto, “20th Century Words” (1989), Cambridge University Press.)

Edit: Small discussion about this post on Hacker News