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Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#31

Post by Xylakant »

raverbashing wrote: post #28
spiralpolitik wrote: post #3

They said that for the mainframe and mini people at the end of the 90s and yet all the people who I know who worked in those areas are still employed, still making good money, and will still be doing so for the foreseeable future. Technology lasts a surprisingly long time and not everybody needs to keep jumping on the new hotness.

It might pay the bills, but you'll work on exactly ZERO new developments. You won't be able to work with Web/Embedded/Mobile. Your developments will probably be "new report at bank" or "fixing new bugs" So, unless you learn other stuff, it might get you the money but it's probably something veery boring (even more boring than your corporate CRUD app)

Most jobs in Web and Mobile are fairly boring. People program Wordpress Templates for a living. Fix bugs on rails installations. Run 400 Servers that run a shop. The next app that displays data from an API. Actually, very few jobs are "exciting" as in "really new development or research that was never done before".

Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#32

Post by collyw »

raverbashing wrote: post #28
spiralpolitik wrote: post #3

They said that for the mainframe and mini people at the end of the 90s and yet all the people who I know who worked in those areas are still employed, still making good money, and will still be doing so for the foreseeable future. Technology lasts a surprisingly long time and not everybody needs to keep jumping on the new hotness.

It might pay the bills, but you'll work on exactly ZERO new developments. You won't be able to work with Web/Embedded/Mobile. Your developments will probably be "new report at bank" or "fixing new bugs" So, unless you learn other stuff, it might get you the money but it's probably something veery boring (even more boring than your corporate CRUD app)

I will do boring if the pay is high enough. Learning a new JS framework every 6 months can get kind of tiresome as well I imagine.

Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#33

Post by Mvandenbergh »

The way to prevent your skills from becoming obsolete is to learn related skills rather than very different ones.

The people making money writing pure html in the early 90's who are still employed mostly didn't move on to writing systems code in C or business logic in Java, they learned css, javascript, and/or Flash and kept making web sites for clients. The ones who managed to keep charging high rates did that by always being just in front of the curve on 'hot' technologies.

Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#34

Post by collyw »

tscherno wrote: post #11
oafitupa wrote: post #6

Why bother learning another language that is almost the same, like PHP and Ruby? In both you need to keep up with lots of dependencies and practices that keep popping up, and it's a waste of time doing it for both in parallel. I'd say it's better to focus on one language, and if it becomes obsolete I don't see why you couldn't just dedicate a week to master the other one. And anyway I don't see how one of those langu…

I don't think that it is possible to master a language in a week. You can learn the basic concepts for sure but there is usually a lot more like idiomatic problem solving, libraries, frameworks, best practices etc. In my experience you acquire those by working with the language every day for a year or so... and then you are still far away from "master".

Sure but I think I'd rather have a developer with 10 years of experience working on a new language with me, rather than someone with a couple of years experience in that language and nothing else.

It didn't take me long to go from Perl to Python (though they are very similar languages aside from Syntax). I knew how to do something in Perl, I would just google for the Python equivalent.

Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#38

Post by JacobAldridge »

This applies in more fields than just programming. I've won a number of clients over the years based on the fact that most of my competitors (business strategy coaching / consulting) are 'one trick ponies'.

"How are you different to X?"

"My company has IP that addresses all 20 areas of business, and I work as part of a team so I can ship in a specialist if need be.

"X is great at following the bouncing ball to give you a marketing plan - if you have revenue issues, they will sell you a marketing plan; if you have culture issues, they will sell you a marketing plan; if you want to exit your business for the highest valuation in 2 years, they will sell you a marketing plan.

"When you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. They only have a hammer, so you'll never be able to trust them when they diagnose your problem as a nail. A nail which needs a marketing plan."

-----------------------------------

s/marketing plan/ruby on rails

s/ruby on rails/julia

s/julia/.NET

Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#39

Post by kibwen »

Aardwolf wrote: post #35

I don't think C++ would become obsolete any time soon, right?

Not a chance. It's possible that the rate of new projects written in C++ could decline as other languages attempt to eat its lunch (disclaimer: I'm a big Rust fan, and this is exactly what we're trying to do), but C++ is a titanic industry juggernaut. Code doesn't just go away, and even bad code only needs to work "well enough" in order to make it virtually impossible to muster the political will to mount a rewrite.

Re: Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony

#40

Post by gk1 »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #38

This applies in more fields than just programming. I've won a number of clients over the years based on the fact that most of my competitors (business strategy coaching / consulting) are 'one trick ponies'. "How are you different to X?" "My company has IP that addresses all 20 areas of business, and I work as part of a team so I can ship in a specialist if need be. "X is great at following the bouncing ball to give y…

That's a great line.

When I became a marketing consultant, I made a decision to never sell marketing plans. When I worked at an agency, I would cringe when we delivered 100-page (and more) marketing plans because I knew not a single word of it would be read, let alone implemented.

Still, people are out there selling these plans, and whatever are the generic equivalents in programming. Which is why your line is probably very effective.

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