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44 lines
2.0 KiB
44 lines
2.0 KiB
5 years ago
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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Companies Look For Specialists But Keep Generalists Longer"
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date = 2019-07-17
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "jobs", "specialists", "generalists"]
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If you know a lot about one single language, it may make it easier to get a
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job, but in the long run, language usage dies or loses its charms and you'll
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need to find something else. Knowing a bit about a lot of other languages
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helps in the long run, not to mention that may help you think of better
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solutions.
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Even if you're in a shop that is mainly in one single language, that's no
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excuse to not check other languages. But, then again, learning languages that
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are just small changes on the current language would not help you either.
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Alan Perlis, author of the ALGOL language, has one excellent phrase: "A
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language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth
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knowing."
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I still maintain one single rule for programming languages: The language I use
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at work must not be the same language I use outside it[^1]. That simple rule
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made sure I was always learning something new.
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Learning a new language can also help you understand things in some language
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you used before: Rust help me understand how generics works in Java; seeing
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how to do dependency injection in C++ help me understand how Spring does it in
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Java.
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On top of that, because I was always learning something new, moving between
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projects was something that happened a lot. At one point, I was hired to work
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with Python, but the contract was taking too long to be signed, and my manager
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asked if I could help some other team with their iOS application. Because I
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did learn a bit about Objective-C, surely I could help. Later, another project
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in C show up and guess who also knew C?
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[^1]: ... which led me into some sad times when I was working with Python.
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{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/google-code-style", prev_chapter_title="... Unless That Code Style Is The Google Code Style") }}
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