131–140 of 308 posts
The problem is when you define yourself by the technology you know. You’re an app developer or an engineer, not a flutter developer. Focus on showing your ability to make apps or whatever the target company does.
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> Are you going to hire me to lead a team working on a 10 year old complicated Java app when all of my “enterprise” experience is in the .Net ecosystem? Yes. The skills are fungible.
And I would be a horrible hire to lead a team where I’m expected to mentor junior developers on best practices, which packages to use, how best to work with technical debt, etc. In the real world, I’m interviewing for positions where they are looking for leads at cloud consulting companies who can mentor juniors and that they can put in front of customers for recommendations, estimating statements of work for impleme…
Other than awful, unsuitable for production languages like ruby.
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As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.
Google can hire separate developers for each platform and pay them, investing millions of dollars into their mobile app. Can you afford to spend money developing same thing twice forever?
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Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…
Thanks very much for posting this, totally agree. I get frustrated when I hear all these missives about how easy it is for any good developer to learn a new language "in a couple days". I think this paragraph was key: > Learning a language is easy. Modern development requires knowing the toolchain framework, idiosyncrasies, foot guns, best practices, etc. That said, I still nearly always hire for general skills and n…
Because of the stupidity of hiring and raise practices (not your fault as a hiring manager), you can get HR to open a job req at market rates. But it’s a lot harder to get HR to allow you to give your current employees raises to get them at market rate.
That investment is then lost because your employee is going to jump ship.
I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…
Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…
All this stuff is the same as learning the details of the language. Once you know the pattern it’s not hard to use it in a context with incidental differences in details. It’s usually more than days, but can easily be weeks or months — it depends on how well you really know the patterns. If you really know them it is just days.
But being hired is a completely different thing. Hiring managers (1) don’t understand any of this, generally; and (2) in any case, have no way to directly determine whether a candidate really knows all the relevant patterns. They use past direct experience with the technology as an approximation (a pretty poor one, but it’s easy).
Personally, I’ve done many jobs successfully on stacks I didn’t have previous experience with, almost always as lead or sole. But of course, I got these jobs through people who know me, not a random hiring manager.
(BTW, the skills most important for a lead/architect type have nothing to do with specific technologies. You’re making sure the project/team/product/business doesn’t run into dead ends and progresses efficiently, daily, in the short term, the medium term, and the long term, and balancing their conflicting needs. Probably less than half of this is tech at all.)
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And I would be a horrible hire to lead a team where I’m expected to mentor junior developers on best practices, which packages to use, how best to work with technical debt, etc. In the real world, I’m interviewing for positions where they are looking for leads at cloud consulting companies who can mentor juniors and that they can put in front of customers for recommendations, estimating statements of work for impleme…
How hard is it to find a few mainstream opensource projects and emulate what they're doing in a given language when it comes to packaging and best practices? Other than awful, unsuitable for production languages like ruby.
On the other hand, would you know the limitations of Dapper until your system grew and you found out that you really needed EF but because you didn’t know the tradeoffs you didn’t know what to look out for?
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You're not wrong, but thankfully job openings are more fungible than ever too, with remote positions open at plenty of companies that won't make that particular (not-)hiring mistake.
Remote positions make it easier not harder to find someone with the skills fit that a company needs and makes any position more competitive. When companies were looking for “a C# developer who knew the latest front end framework who was willing to commute to the office in midtown Atlanta” the pool was a lot smaller than “someone legally allowed to work in the US”
For anyone reading this and if you want to develop mobile apps, just first learn native iOS/Android platforms, they are not going anywhere before you get tempted by other flashy technologies like Flutter or React Native. Most companies including the ones that created these cross platform frameworks, build thier core apps using native stack for a reason.
I used to say just this. And I did native Android dev for many years, but I gave it up around 2019. When I finally checked out, native Android was a teetering mess of compatibility libraries, half-baked never-finished “new ways of doing things”, lacking docs, forever-bugs, and overall neglect. Simple ui would take you 5x as long as equivalent css and have you dropping down to low level drawing in frustration. Back th…
It’s better than non native for performance and experience but many companies will of course care more about the money saved from a sub native experience with fewer developers.
I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…
Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…
I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…
It's one thing knowing the language, it's another being productive with the ecosystem. One takes between a few days and a few months. The other is a few years, unless you get pro training. I guarantee most people starting with Python from another language will be productive quickly. But they will curse the packaging ecosystem because they will follow a lot of tutorials that don't follow this: https://bitecode.substac…
However if I need to do quiz, or coding exercise, closed book style, only Java and C#, to a lesser extent C++, would be a viable option for me.