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by blub
2106 days ago
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Yes, that is the conundrum of modern software engineering. Companies would like to have people that are flexible and can jump on any language or technology while people have a natural need to sharpen their skills and build upon and enrich their existing knowledge. Learning the Nth framework or language is neither of those. It's a grind, it's waste and it's always running only to stay in the same place. Programmers instinctually feel this, but the argument of flexibility is persuasive and market success does seem at least to correlate with breadth of skills. To put it bluntly: many programmers don't give a crap about building successful products or producing value and instead want to become masters at what they do. |
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If we don’t constantly hone our skills and learn new things we risk getting left behind. I think programmers can imagine that as a bigger threat than it is, but it can happen if one chooses a dead end to specialize in. Not getting in on a trend early presents the risk of getting left behind, especially in today’s tech hiring process that often requires experience with relatively young languages and tools. That said I would still focus on the larger trends rather than specific languages or tools.
When I got into programming 40 years ago it was just barely possible to learn most of the major languages and tools used in business applications. Today that’s not even possible for niches like web development. I read an interview with Bill Gates a while back. We’re close to the same age. He said he just got lucky, born at the right time, and he got into programming as a teenager and grew up with the technology. He said it’s much harder now to get started because there are so many places to start, so much to learn, and the languages and tools continue to drop on us faster than we can keep up. That can lead to despair, or over-specialization.
I now specialize in web applications, but I can’t learn everything, so I don’t try. I wait until something gets traction, when I start seeing demand from customers (rather than HN buzz or a mention in the TIOBE rankings), before I pay attention to it. Once a language or tool gets significant traction it tends to have a long lifespan: Unix, C, COBOL, SQL and relational databases, PHP, etc. I work mainly on legacy software so I don’t have to stay bleeding edge. I know this seems like a boring “I give up” path, and I partly got here because of increasing age discrimination, but it let me relax a bit about keeping up with beta versions of Rust and React and focus more on what my customers actually want.