[prea]

At every company I've worked at where I stayed for a bit, I eventually had to work on languages and stacks that I wasn't technically hired for/had interest in. At the very beginning I found this very hard, also wanting to quit/actually quitting. I've come to accept that this is actually pretty normal. The benefits to my career from working on a bunch of different stuff I didn't pick have been substantial.

Caveat: I probably wouldn't take the switcharoo at the very beginning either...if I'm told I'll work on A but actually get B, this is likely a sign of some important things not working well at the org.

[thr0wawayf00]

It's fine when the context switching is managed properly. It's not OK when a company asks a team to spend a month working on a rails service, followed by a month of working on a native app, followed by a month of working on a web front end, which I have experienced.

You wind up exhausting yourself trying to pick up new technologies that you wind up forgetting because you're not given enough time to deeply learn the concepts.

[protomyth]

I've had two companies that switched technology between recruiting me and the start of my employment. It was a bit irritating, but provided an interesting way to learn something new on someone else's dime.

I've also been at a place where I was not allowed to program in C, but had to do all the code reviews for the people programming in C. The "logic" was that since I was doing the code reviews, I shouldn't program in C since no one would review my code. I sometimes wonder about how I encounter these situations a bit too often.

[chihuahua]

That sounds very strange. Your code would be reviewed by the other people writing C code. Were those other people much less experienced than you?

[protomyth]

I was 26 at the time, so I would guess not, but some of the code was problematic. It was very strange.