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It seems like a lot of this is just the tension between what management wants to be focusing on (big picture product or business-level questions) vs what it mak
by ForHackernews 7y ago
It seems like a lot of this is just the tension between what management wants to be focusing on (big picture product or business-level questions) vs what it makes sense for individual engineers to be focusing their efforts on.
As an individual contributor, it's vitally important to keep up with new technologies in order to remain employable. Maybe that isn't in fact the best strategy for your current job, but it's crucial to getting your next job.
Put another way, there are probably a lot of businesses that sensibly standardized on ColdFusion in the early 2000s. Engineers who buckled down and focused on "So what’s your company trying to do?" using CFML could easily find themselves in a really bad spot--unless they were also sacrificing their home life to teach themselves something else.
- cutler 7y agoIf it's vitally important to keep up with new technologies in order to remain employable why are the 7 most employable programming languages (C,C++,Java,PHP,JS,Ruby,Python) at least 25 years old? The job market says the opposite - that new programming languages hardly get a look-in.
- ForHackernews 7y agoProgramming languages alone aren't the only things you have to know in order to be a professional developer. It's also important to keep up with the ecosystem around that language, and industry-wide trends in application design, testing and deployment/ops. Good luck getting a Javascript job if all you know is jQuery, and you've never touched Webpack/React/whatever else JS devs need these days. Maybe JS is an extreme case, but some version of that same phenomenon exists for all the languages you mentioned.