are skills transferable?

I was driving back home today and before I left work, I asked a junior to take a look at a specific frontend framework and learn how to use it. He without thinking for a minute replied back saying he is/aspires to be an ML researcher and he would never do anything related to frontend in his life. I was in a hurry so I left. While driving back home I was thinking about this. He’s not wrong but at the same time I felt his approach towards learning in general is wrong. Obviously he can become the best researcher and spend the rest of his career doing research. This is a possibility.

But at the same time, this was a shocking answer. I am exactly in the opposite school of this thought process. I firmly believe every skill in the world is transferable.
A wrong way to measure transferable skills is to see whether you can apply the entire skill elsewhere. For example, you have learned Python but you work as a devops engineer and your day job is to write a bunch of bash scripts. Some random day your team decides to start writing scripts in Python to utilize the existing package ecosystem. In this case you have learned Python and that skill will be very useful to get this task done. This is a no-brainer rudimentary example. Here you learned a skill called Python and you are transferring the entire skill to devops. Not all the time are the learned skills directly used like the example above. If the skill is directly used then we can measure whether the particular skill was transferred or not. But in the majority of cases it’s not very straightforward until you think about it deeply. In fact, the topic of transferable skills comes into the picture when we learn a skill that has no correlation or doesn’t directly enhance your main skill.

I was fortunate that I didn’t have to go to in-person college for my engineering degree because of my friend’s help I spent the least time doing engineering (obviously a mistake but that’s for another day) and more time exploring different hobbies. One such hobby of mine is filmmaking and photography. I learned filmmaking by joining a school alongside my engineering degree. Then I started making short films and went through the usual film bro arc. But one key gig which I got then was assisting to write a standup comedy show for a comic. He is a leading comic in Chennai so I didn’t wanna miss out on this opportunity. It was such a fun experience. I learned a lot, especially about how to write jokes without offending anyone because the Chennai standup scene is set up in such a way (at least a few years back) that you can’t offend or make jokes about the audience who pay for your show. This is completely irrelevant to my coding job which I do now. But every single time there is a gathering or an official meeting, I am the one who breaks the ice. You can’t offend C-suite managers but you have to get started, make a good rapport and the best way is to start things lighter. Where did I learn this skill? Not from corporate training but from the practice of writing pages after pages of jokes and understanding what’s offensive, what’s correct, what works and what doesn’t. Irrelevant but still transferable.

I will give you another example. I started my startup journey in the security/compliance domain. Everything is strict and rigid one mistake and your startup reputation is gone. So coding standards were strict and stringent. You get attacked all the time, we pay to pentest as well and you learn about various attack vectors and security lessons out of it. Now I work in a completely different domain but every time I review code I see things from a security-first perspective. It just comes automatically. For me, security check first before logical correctness. Nobody asked me to do it but it’s a skill that got transferred from one domain to another. The good part here is it doesn’t have to be a very deliberate skill that you need to force and practice. Embrace the fact that all skills directly or indirectly influence each other and be open-minded to try out new things.

In tech it is very common to use an architecture or coding pattern or design principles from one random domain to another. For example, all modern programming languages like Go have this concept called garbage collectors. Dropbox uses the exact same concepts, modified for their use case in creating high-throughput immutable blob storage called magic pocket. The architecture only emerged because someone once learned something about programming language design and garbage collectors that had nothing to do with their day-to-day work. The industry will keep changing and the percentage of people who do the same work from day one till they retire is very small. We have to keep evolving and an important aspect of evolving is learning from other skills. Same with hobbies, picking up sports, prioritizing health, etc.