[ttamslam]

Your question about "forever newbie" is really interesting to me, and I'd love input from people with more experience in software development (15+ years).

Personally, I love the idea of jumping around every 18 months or so to experience new domains, new technologies and learn from new people, but I also worry a lot that this will severely limit my career potential after I've done it for 10-15 years.

[danielscrubs]

Basically it boils down to responsibility. You can’t see the effects of your code if you jump around every year. Everyone thinks that they are good at writing code, until they have to maintain their own mess after a couple of years (not a month in production). Cowboy slinging is something we do for fun but as an adult we need to eat our veggies (writing documentation, choosing the language with a stable tooling, proper time estimation and everything else that seem unglamorous and easily dismissed).

[fatnoah]

>Your question about "forever newbie" is really interesting to me, and I'd love input from people with more experience in software development (15+ years).

I'm 20+ years in and HATE changing jobs. The initial period where I'm Jon Snow (I know nothing) is always annoying and makes me feel like I'm not contributing at a level that supports my role and compensation. I find that it takes 3 months to start to understand conversations, 6 months to contribute to them, and 9-12 months to really be a consistent and effective leader of things.