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I've made this transition over the last few months. For the past eight years, aside from dabbling on my own, I've been a .NET developer. I've worked in startups, agencies, and good-sized companies, and have delivered more projects than I can count. I've also given talks at user groups, and have delivered open-source tools. I wasn't an expert, but I'd say that I knew C# and .NET reasonably well. However, I always felt a bit of imposter syndrome. While the .NET world is more open than ever, you still feel like you're an apple in an orange-infested world. Literally everyone else builds on Mac/Linux, and while the tools differ between languages a PHP developer would have more in common with a Python developer than they would with a .NET developer. So, I left a senior role and took a standard dev role in a software house with zero .NET tooling, and have forced myself to learn different languages in anger, instead of restricting myself to only learning in my free time. It's been hard, but I feel like I'm learning loads every day. I've also learned things I would've probably ignored if I was doing this in my free time, like Ruby and Rails. I still feel like an idiot most days, but I'm hoping that in the next few years I'll go from being a solid C¢ developer to a solid developer, and that alone will go a long way towards getting over that imposter hump. So, my advice is to try and learn what you can on your own, but if you feel that you are better served by working with this tools "in anger" or around a team that really knows its tools then look for a job that both allows you to do this. Once you reach a point where you're comfortable in a language, move to something new, but keep that language to your free time. |