3 ms·

Dear god yes, agreed. For someone still learning the ropes, the absolute torrent of new buzzwords/languages/dbs is really fatiguing.

kyle_t 13y ago
It truly is and even for experienced developers it can be overwhelming. It is simply impossible for anyone person to be knowledgeable every new technology and/or programming language. I used to constantly fall in the trap of shallow but wide breadth of knowledge. Something new would come out and I would drop everything and dive right in. It feels rewarding at the time but really in the end has very little benefit (unless of course your a tech reporter). My advice is to achieve a narrow and deep knowledge base. Pick a few that you feel passionate about and really concentrate on mastering those. It would help to pick those that have a large number of related job openings if its your livelihood. Mastering Java may seem old school, but the number of job postings I still see for java developers is amazing.
- danielweber 13y ago
  It is incredibly fatiguing. Oh, you were working at a company for two years on technology X? Sorry, we need to hire someone who knows Y which you couldn't because you were working on X. No, I don't care that you could learn it in 3 days, our HR procedure says we can't give you 3 days. Then I go download some C source code from 15 years ago and it still compiles just fine and I smile a little bit.
craigyk 13y ago
Yes, and to imagine I only got started in front and back-end web-development 3 years ago when I'd say things were even crazier. While learning I was being bombarded by the explosion of HTML5, CSS3, LESS, SASS, Stylus, templating engines: Mustache, Handlebars, Jade, Dust, server side frameworks: express, flatiron, tornado, client-side: prototype, knockout, ember, meteor, etc. It was common for me to see HN announcements for new JS libs or frameworks that would obviate my previous three weeks of work. This really prompted me to enter a magpie phase since it's hard to put your nose to the grindstone if you can hope (often with success) that someone else will solve your problem for you.

kyle_t 13y ago

It truly is and even for experienced developers it can be overwhelming. It is simply impossible for anyone person to be knowledgeable every new technology and/or programming language. I used to constantly fall in the trap of shallow but wide breadth of knowledge. Something new would come out and I would drop everything and dive right in. It feels rewarding at the time but really in the end has very little benefit (unless of course your a tech reporter). My advice is to achieve a narrow and deep knowledge base. Pick a few that you feel passionate about and really concentrate on mastering those. It would help to pick those that have a large number of related job openings if its your livelihood. Mastering Java may seem old school, but the number of job postings I still see for java developers is amazing.

danielweber 13y ago
It is incredibly fatiguing. Oh, you were working at a company for two years on technology X? Sorry, we need to hire someone who knows Y which you couldn't because you were working on X. No, I don't care that you could learn it in 3 days, our HR procedure says we can't give you 3 days. Then I go download some C source code from 15 years ago and it still compiles just fine and I smile a little bit.

craigyk 13y ago

Yes, and to imagine I only got started in front and back-end web-development 3 years ago when I'd say things were even crazier. While learning I was being bombarded by the explosion of HTML5, CSS3, LESS, SASS, Stylus, templating engines: Mustache, Handlebars, Jade, Dust, server side frameworks: express, flatiron, tornado, client-side: prototype, knockout, ember, meteor, etc. It was common for me to see HN announcements for new JS libs or frameworks that would obviate my previous three weeks of work. This really prompted me to enter a magpie phase since it's hard to put your nose to the grindstone if you can hope (often with success) that someone else will solve your problem for you.