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I'm not sure BlackBerry developers are a good example. Some of the best engineers I know working in mobile got there because they worked for years on BlackBerry
by akiselev 10y ago
I'm not sure BlackBerry developers are a good example. Some of the best engineers I know working in mobile got there because they worked for years on BlackBerry learning how professionals used their phones, how to optimize software for battery life, how to adapt company workflow to mobile, etc. Making the switch to the modern incarnation of the smartphone with touchscreens wasn't difficult.
It seems that outside a few safe areas (compilers, operating systems, etc) it's really hit or miss on whether your skills are adaptable to the evolving tech landscape.
- fowkswe 10y agoLot's of Flash developers got caught with their pants down. If you were good, you moved into iOS (or jumped on the ever morphing javascript train), but lots of them were not T shaped and struggled to transition their skillset.
- Naritai 10y agoFair enough. I'm sure you can think of a technology, though, that made nice coin for a few years until suddenly it didn't.
- dredmorbius 10y agoIf not Blackberry, then: 1. Novell Networks. 2. SAP. 3. Peoplesoft. 4. COBOL. 5. Y2K. 6. Perl. 7. Visual Basic. 8. CORBA. 9. XML. 10. Freeway Engineering (if you were in California in the 1970s). 11. Nuclear Engineering (if you were anywhere on Earth after 28 March 1979). There's an old saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none." Less well-known is the rejoinder: "though ofttimes better than master of one". The point being that finding yourself with a single competency can be narrowing. Multiple points of expertise give you leverage and pivot capability. The balance is in sorting where and how to develop expertise.