You’ve probably all heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule from his book, Outliers? In it he suggests that roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes an individual world-class in their field. But is 10,000 hours enough in the field of OSS?
I look back to the year 2000, when I first started on OSS projects. Over the following 5 years or so, I averaged an 85 hour week (whilst being paid for a 40 hour week, but I just loved what I was doing!!). If we multiply 85 by 48 by 5, we end up with 20,400 hours. That’s double the Gladwell rule. And I was lucky to have been handed assignments across the whole gamut of OSS activities, not just monotonously repeating the same tasks over and over. But those first 5 years / 20,000+ hours were barely the tip of the iceberg in terms of OSS expertise.
Whilst 10,000 hours might work for repetitive activities such as golf, tennis, chess, music, etc it’s probably less impactful for such multi-faceted fields as OSS.
So, what does it take to make an OSS expert? Narrow focus on just one of the facets? Broad view across many facets? Experience just using, building, designing, optimising OSS, or all of those things? Study, practice or a combination of both?
If you’re an OSS expert, or you know any who stand head and shoulders above all others, how would you describe the path that got you / them there?
Or if I were to ask another way, how would you get an OSS newbie up to speed if you were asked to mentor them from your lofty position of expertise?
Standing out in a highly saturated and fragmented OSS market can be really difficult. We’re regularly involved in bake-offs where we see dozens of OSS
One of the things I love about my job is all the vendor demos I get to see. Product demos are one of the four
Have you read the book, “The 4-hour work week” by Tim Ferris? It was one of those relatively rare books that inspired a complete mindset
Over the years, we’ve been involved in many OSS procurement events and have seen a variety of different pricing models proposed by vendors. Being software,
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
