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What about specializing in a platform or language makes it hard to fashion a value proposition for it relative to one’s competitors in the market? (Not disagree
by pw 9y ago
What about specializing in a platform or language makes it hard to fashion a value proposition for it relative to one’s competitors in the market? (Not disagreeing; just trying to wrap my head around this. Also, I think your comments in this thread have been super useful.)
- tptacek 9y agoEvery senior developer in the market who codes at all in your platform is going to represent themselves as a subject matter expert in that platform. To make matters worse, developers will disagree with each other about what the Right Answers are for a given platform or language or engineering approach. Cryptographers (as a counterexample) also disagree with each other about the Right Answers in crypto. But serious crypto people are generally competing for jobs only against other serious crypto people, and there aren't that many of them. Moreover, the general domain of cryptography isn't going anywhere. But look at Objective C, or Windows Mobile. Finally, proving value as a subject matter expert on a language or platform depends on companies having hiring processes that reliably spot expertise. But, of course, hiring processes do a terrible job at that.
- pw 9y agoThanks so much for the response. Can you say any more about what kind of domains tend to be lucrative? It seems like all your examples (distributed systems, sensor fusion, software security, OS kernels) seem very “technical”, for lack of a better word, compared to, say, knowing a lot about the health club industry (a different example mentioned in this thread). Do you think that’s an important distinction?