"The technology at the leading edge changes so rapidly that you have to keep current after you get out of school. I think probably the most important thing is having good fundamentals"
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Moore sounds like he is offering a gentle study tip. He is really laying out the survival logic of the modern economy, spoken by someone who helped speed it up. Coming from the co-founder of Intel and the namesake of Moore's Law, the line doubles as confession: the industry he built runs on planned obsolescence, not just of devices but of expertise. If the frontier moves every 18 months, your diploma is a snapshot, not a passport.
The first sentence flatters "the leading edge" while quietly demoting it. Keeping current is framed as a permanent condition, the price of admission for anyone who wants proximity to innovation. The subtext is slightly ruthless: if you stop learning, you don't merely fall behind, you become irrelevant. In Silicon Valley terms, you get deprecated.
Then Moore pivots to fundamentals, which reads like a counterweight to hype. He is not dismissing new tools; he is arguing that the only stable asset in a high-churn technological culture is conceptual depth: math, physics, systems thinking, the ability to reason from first principles. Fundamentals are portable; frameworks outlive languages; understanding survives version updates. It is also a leadership argument. Companies cannot scale on fashionable skills alone, because fashion is a bad operating system.
Context matters: this is the voice of a businessman-engineer who watched computing turn from specialized craft into a global infrastructure. The line is a rebuke to credentialism and a quiet endorsement of humility: your edge will dull. Build the blade, not the sparkle.
The first sentence flatters "the leading edge" while quietly demoting it. Keeping current is framed as a permanent condition, the price of admission for anyone who wants proximity to innovation. The subtext is slightly ruthless: if you stop learning, you don't merely fall behind, you become irrelevant. In Silicon Valley terms, you get deprecated.
Then Moore pivots to fundamentals, which reads like a counterweight to hype. He is not dismissing new tools; he is arguing that the only stable asset in a high-churn technological culture is conceptual depth: math, physics, systems thinking, the ability to reason from first principles. Fundamentals are portable; frameworks outlive languages; understanding survives version updates. It is also a leadership argument. Companies cannot scale on fashionable skills alone, because fashion is a bad operating system.
Context matters: this is the voice of a businessman-engineer who watched computing turn from specialized craft into a global infrastructure. The line is a rebuke to credentialism and a quiet endorsement of humility: your edge will dull. Build the blade, not the sparkle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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