[throwanem]

> I’m worried that being involved with shorter term projects means I won’t get the chance to gain _deep_ expertise in any one thing, which might hurt my future job prospects

This is a reasonable thing to worry about, but don't overlook the opportunity to gain broad experience across the entire product lifecycle - not just with multiple technologies, but also working with customers, developing requirements and designing products to meet them, ops and maintenance, tier 2/escalation support, and all manner of other aspects of working with software that a lot of engineers in my experience tend to overlook.

You won't come out of it with exhaustive knowledge in one specific stack, sure. But you very well can come out of it a much more well-rounded engineer, and that can easily do more for your ability to contribute - and thus your prospects - than any single deep, narrow specialization ever will.

I started my career in the kind of role you're considering now, only in those days the tech was all Perl 5 and PHP 5. I was good at them then, but have barely so much as touched either language in about a decade at this point. No tech stack is forever; what's been of enduring value has almost entirely been the kind of broad experience I describe. Not all that many engineers in my experience can and will also sit down with clients to help figure out what they actually need, and then prioritize, plan, schedule, and lead the work to build it. Not all that many engineers can and will volunteer to handle customer support escalations, and be able to do so effectively, in order to get insight into where the pain points are and how to solve them. A job like the one you're considering is a great opportunity to learn those things by doing them; I don't know of any better.

Sure, if you ultimately want to take tickets and work tickets somewhere in the bowels of a FAANG, stuff like that probably won't be all that useful. If you want to start your own company, I think a job like this will be of immense value to you. Ultimately, of course it's up to you and what you want to get out of your next role - I hope I've been able to provide a decent sense of what this kind of role can give you.

[jrumbut]

One thing to think about, it terms of deep experience, is that in a product role you'll often only be using part of a stack. If, for instance, you are making a CMS you won't touch the numerical parts of the language. In consulting you may get to choose between using more of what's available in a stack or branching out to other technologies.

The entrepreneur thing is true too, I went from an employee to running my own operation and nothing was really surprising. I'm not sure how many other jobs you can make that transition so easily.

[throwanem]

Even if you just go self-employed as a consultant, it's a great springboard. A few years at a good small firm can give you everything you need except a decent accountant.