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implying that every developer needs to continuously be learning the latest technology/platform Generally speaking the idea behind that sentiment is that a ASP.
by sp4rki 16y ago
implying that every developer needs to continuously be learning the latest technology/platform
Generally speaking the idea behind that sentiment is that a ASP.NET MVC dev should keep up with MVC3 and Razor. That Rails devs should keep up with Rails 3. That Javascript devs should keep up with Node.js and the plethora or new libraries/frameworks coming out. Sure you might know a gazillion languages, but the only real requirement is to keep up with the developments of the technologies you need NOW.
I agree that no developer should be expected to know everything, nevertheless he/she should be able to pick up anything fast and easy. It is my firm belief that people should be paid by the value they provide, instead of the technologies they're well versed in.
On another note, I'm by no means a genius rocket scientist turned developer, but in the last 6 years I went from implementing complex E-Commerce Java backends, to front end development and design, to Php app dev, back to Java, to Rails webapps, to system administration and some Python dev, to (right now) Asp MVC and C# dev. I've been using Visual Studio (which I had never used) in a virtual machine running Windows (which I last used when XP came out circa late 2001), and I was productive within the first 2 or 3 days from when I started. Sure I'm a lot better now - 2 weeks into the job, but any developer worth his salt could have tackled the "mobile dev" stuff that the author of the main article was referring to in two or three weeks of training/tinkering. The problem these days are the business types hiring people because they've used some cool new tech, instead of hiring based on trajectory, experience, and perceived value.
- tgflynn 16y agoI completely agree with you, I've always been much of a generalist myself and after a while you realize that the fundamental patterns of technology remain fairly constant, only the details change. It's just that there's a difference between being able to learn new technologies and feeling like you have to. Good developers certainly have high learning capacity but none of us has infinite learning capacity. My concern is that given the pace of technological change we create (or are forced to create) unrealistic expectations of ourselves. If the lead developer on an ongoing successful product is made to feel that he needs to learn mobile development, I think that maybe crossing a line (of course everything depends on the exact circumstances, if the product were stable and the mobile interface was all that remained to be done it might be a different story).
- sp4rki 16y agoWell the thing is... a company needs to have employees that create value for itself. I was once in the position of telling an employer that he was wrong to want to hire an extra Rails dev when we had a front end guy that had little work at the time and had the drive and fast learning capability to learn it in a week or two, at least to decent productive standards. The new hire was a disaster, and three months later was replaced by the guy that I said we could train. For more money than the new hire. A lead developer should not be expected to know everything, but he needs to know how to solve problems, regardless of the medium, and regardless of the programming language. A lead developer should not only be expected to get into mobile development when required, but he should also be involved in the effort to pursue said mobile solution.