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People get stuck in expert beginner land in no small part due to how shitty the hiring/training process is in most places. Outside of big tech companies and SV,

People get stuck in expert beginner land in no small part due to how shitty the hiring/training process is in most places. Outside of big tech companies and SV, no one hires generalists (past entry-level dev) and your resume gets screened out if you don't tick all the right boxes for language/framework (right down to exact framework..) or have a BigCo brand. No one is willing to take on people who might need the slightest bit of ramp up time on new tech. So if you don't get all the right chances early, the only jobs you can even get hired into are those doing almost the exact same shit you have always done. God forbid someone hires a Java developer without experience in Spring into a gasp role that requires Spring (I see this constantly)! I suspect managers like the authors basically fulfill their own prophecy. They insist on putting people into boxes and pretending they cannot learn, provide little opportunity to do so, and then blame the devs when they do not grow.

travoltaj 8y ago
Your Java example hits too close to home. I know Java pretty well, and despite several good interviews, I got rejected because I didn't know Spring. One company even told me to learn Spring, build an independent project on it, and come back to interview. They followed up with me for 3 months after that till I told them not to anymore. At that time I was proficient in Java, Angular, Typescript, C# & Jython. Ironically - I got hired into a product company which mostly works on their own internal java frameworks and didn't have a spring requirement. I figured I'll have to give time to learning Spring on the side since most Java jobs require it, but my first project here was on Spring Boot/Hibernate/Angular because of a client requirement, and I was put on it purely because of my Angular knowledge. I'd understand if a company required complicated stuff done in Spring/Hibernate, but most organizations use of Spring Boot is limited to building rest APIs, for which no previous knowledge is necessary. I haven't yet run into an issue I couldn't solve by less than an hour of googling despite having no experience in it beforehand - even making interceptors and adding Spring Security. Because of its simplicity I do wonder if I've barely touched the edge of it, and the usual usecase is much more complicated than this, but I'm planning on learning spring on Udemy anyway, so I guess I'll find out.

travoltaj 8y ago

Your Java example hits too close to home. I know Java pretty well, and despite several good interviews, I got rejected because I didn't know Spring. One company even told me to learn Spring, build an independent project on it, and come back to interview. They followed up with me for 3 months after that till I told them not to anymore. At that time I was proficient in Java, Angular, Typescript, C# & Jython. Ironically - I got hired into a product company which mostly works on their own internal java frameworks and didn't have a spring requirement. I figured I'll have to give time to learning Spring on the side since most Java jobs require it, but my first project here was on Spring Boot/Hibernate/Angular because of a client requirement, and I was put on it purely because of my Angular knowledge. I'd understand if a company required complicated stuff done in Spring/Hibernate, but most organizations use of Spring Boot is limited to building rest APIs, for which no previous knowledge is necessary. I haven't yet run into an issue I couldn't solve by less than an hour of googling despite having no experience in it beforehand - even making interceptors and adding Spring Security. Because of its simplicity I do wonder if I've barely touched the edge of it, and the usual usecase is much more complicated than this, but I'm planning on learning spring on Udemy anyway, so I guess I'll find out.