4 ms·

Unless one literally does not care about computers AT ALL, and is content with front-end development, having no hobbies involving any OTHER kind of development

Unless one literally does not care about computers AT ALL, and is content with front-end development, having no hobbies involving any OTHER kind of development etc, one will end up being a bit of a "full stack developer". I, frankly, don't trust career coders who don't have an active interest in the broader activities around coding, software, hardware, maybe HDL's and FPGA's, or low-level stuff with microcontrollers etc. as it appears that a career coder who specializes and then expresses no further interest in branching out is merely milking a perceived cash cow and not going to show an interest in how even the specialized piece they are building inter-relates with the other pieces of the puzzle.

amoitnga 8y ago
Feels like this is something a person who expects me to work on weekends would think. Don't get me wrong, I used to agree with you, I know however believe otherwise. There is more to life than coding and computing. We have to have time for families and other hobbies. There is only so much time to do it all. Work + trying to stay up to date already takes the main chunk of it.
nkozyra 8y ago
> I, frankly, don't trust career coders who don't have an active interest in the broader activities around coding I think that's unfair and ends up feeling a lot like signaling to me. Some of those things I'm very interested in, but there are tons of development things I'm just not excited about. I don't care about containerization trends, about kernels, not all that interested in chasing the new shiny front-end stuff. I am curious about FPGAs but don't have enough reason to go farther than that. I know devs who do not care about machine learning, about databases, whatever, but are very adept at their areas of interest. If I talk about my hobby work with robotics and microcontrollers and another dev isn't interested at all, I'm not going to judge their general skills. Expecting people to be excited about anything related to computers, hardware, general engineering isn't very realistic. It's such an amazingly broad cross-section of fields and interests.
- Ragib_Zaman 8y ago
  I think OP was saying he would be suspicious of a coder who was not interested in at least one area outside their professional domain, not any given area. If that's the case then I have to say I agree with them.
kasey_junk 8y ago
Well you forget about the other direction. I’ve spent so much of my time getting computers to talk to each other I’ve missed the last 15 years or so of web GUI work. Some stuff has happened in that time... Last time I tried to sit down and learn some front end tech I ran screaming as the technology was do splintered, opinionated and nothing was obviously long term stable.

amoitnga 8y ago

Feels like this is something a person who expects me to work on weekends would think. Don't get me wrong, I used to agree with you, I know however believe otherwise. There is more to life than coding and computing. We have to have time for families and other hobbies. There is only so much time to do it all. Work + trying to stay up to date already takes the main chunk of it.

nkozyra 8y ago

> I, frankly, don't trust career coders who don't have an active interest in the broader activities around coding I think that's unfair and ends up feeling a lot like signaling to me. Some of those things I'm very interested in, but there are tons of development things I'm just not excited about. I don't care about containerization trends, about kernels, not all that interested in chasing the new shiny front-end stuff. I am curious about FPGAs but don't have enough reason to go farther than that. I know devs who do not care about machine learning, about databases, whatever, but are very adept at their areas of interest. If I talk about my hobby work with robotics and microcontrollers and another dev isn't interested at all, I'm not going to judge their general skills. Expecting people to be excited about anything related to computers, hardware, general engineering isn't very realistic. It's such an amazingly broad cross-section of fields and interests.

Ragib_Zaman 8y ago
I think OP was saying he would be suspicious of a coder who was not interested in at least one area outside their professional domain, not any given area. If that's the case then I have to say I agree with them.

kasey_junk 8y ago

Well you forget about the other direction. I’ve spent so much of my time getting computers to talk to each other I’ve missed the last 15 years or so of web GUI work. Some stuff has happened in that time... Last time I tried to sit down and learn some front end tech I ran screaming as the technology was do splintered, opinionated and nothing was obviously long term stable.