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It depends a lot on the place and the role. I'm hiring for a relatively small cross-functional team that has to deal with a variety of work. One of the charact

It depends a lot on the place and the role. I'm hiring for a relatively small cross-functional team that has to deal with a variety of work. One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work. We have no mobile code and probably won't, but I was still happy to talk with somebody who'd built a couple of iOS apps for fun. It was a sign they were enough of a self-starter that I could trust them to learn on the job when that was necessary, and also that they could think about user needs and how to solve them. It's true that some places basically take the resume of a current engineer and try to clone them by hiring an exact technology match. I'm not sure if that gets them better results or it's just something that's easier for a cumbersome recruiting process. But consider that maybe those are places you wouldn't be very happy anyhow.

giantg2 5y ago
"One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work." Honestly (and no offense), this sounds just like every place. My current job expects me to be full stack on multiple stacks, be the application security champion, and provide rotating (1 week every 3 weeks) prod support for about 10 apps that we own. And it's a mix of legacy and somewhat newer stuff, so DB2 to Dynamo, JSF to Angular, plus all the no-code stuff like Tableau. I feel like this is a huge efficiency drain. Did ECON 101 stop staching about specialization of labor? I'll never be an expert when split across 10 different technologies. I have a bad mid year rating because I'm "slow", but it shouldn't really be surprising when I'm context switching all over the place. I would love a place that says "you will do this one [tech/language/stack] 90% of the time". As soon as a posting or manager starts talking about a plethora of tech that I will have the "opportunity" to work with, I mark that as a potential red flag, it's really just a matter of magnitude since they all do it.
- wpietri 5y ago
  It definitely depends on the place. The last large company I worked at had specialized per-technology teams. The IOS devs would be on a team with other IOS devs. Android with Android, web with web, back end with back end. My boss was seen as unusual for just trying to get different kinds of engineer on one team, even though they'd still specialize. I do think there's a difference between "this is a small team, so we all need to cross-train enough so that we don't have silos" and "we're a large company that never cleans up a mess, so you'll have to be able to work with the code from 7 different half-assed projects going each going back 1d20 years". There's no excuse for the latter, and I'm sorry you're in it.

giantg2 5y ago

"One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work." Honestly (and no offense), this sounds just like every place. My current job expects me to be full stack on multiple stacks, be the application security champion, and provide rotating (1 week every 3 weeks) prod support for about 10 apps that we own. And it's a mix of legacy and somewhat newer stuff, so DB2 to Dynamo, JSF to Angular, plus all the no-code stuff like Tableau. I feel like this is a huge efficiency drain. Did ECON 101 stop staching about specialization of labor? I'll never be an expert when split across 10 different technologies. I have a bad mid year rating because I'm "slow", but it shouldn't really be surprising when I'm context switching all over the place. I would love a place that says "you will do this one [tech/language/stack] 90% of the time". As soon as a posting or manager starts talking about a plethora of tech that I will have the "opportunity" to work with, I mark that as a potential red flag, it's really just a matter of magnitude since they all do it.

wpietri 5y ago
It definitely depends on the place. The last large company I worked at had specialized per-technology teams. The IOS devs would be on a team with other IOS devs. Android with Android, web with web, back end with back end. My boss was seen as unusual for just trying to get different kinds of engineer on one team, even though they'd still specialize. I do think there's a difference between "this is a small team, so we all need to cross-train enough so that we don't have silos" and "we're a large company that never cleans up a mess, so you'll have to be able to work with the code from 7 different half-assed projects going each going back 1d20 years". There's no excuse for the latter, and I'm sorry you're in it.