Software Knowledge Decay Requires Weekly Learning Investment

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Jan 04, 2026 • 1 min read


The half-life of software and cs engineering knowledge is ~7 years.

That means half of what you learned 7 years ago is already obsolete or has been replaced.

To just keep up and stay relevant, we need to invest roughly ~6 hours every week learning new things.

It is scary because irrelevance is a real risk - and fascinating because we get to learn much.

No other professional domain has a shorter half-life.

tbh, I don’t mind :)

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses