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I 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 fairl

by tgflynn 16y ago

I 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 ago
Well 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.