If someone were to call you a "full stack" developer, would that feel like a complement or an insult?
I know managers love that term, but I think I've come to hear it as an insult... Sorta like being called an unprofessional "jack of all trades" budget handyman that does everything mediocre...
Nah, code is code. I've done a good chunk up and down the stack. DB specs, angular, no SQL, sql, react, jQuery, c#, node, infra, k8s, pho, java, blah blah blah
Fact of the matter is if you really want to be marketable you have to learn everything thrown at you, and usually fast. I say my number one skill is being able to pick up new tech, and recognizing where I need to learn more.
Not trying to sound arrogant, there is a ton I don't know, but to be employable now as an engineer you pretty much have to say yes when they ask if you know something, or prove you can learn it.
I was rejected for one job because I hadn't learned python fully.
Oh yeah but I can pick it up, probably before starting. I've done C++, C#, NodeJS, Go, Ruby, what's another language haha
" Sorry we really need someone who can code in python"
:| k well bye, guess it's just impossible to fathom that I could learn yet another scripting backend language. 15 years into my career I'm pretty sure I can just go learn another language now. If you bothered to test my skills at all you'd see in qualified, but sure. I learned it anyway just to spite them.
It wasn't the recruiter, it was the HM that made the decision. Dodged that bullet. The recruiter was great, we actually hung out some time after. He even bought me one of the devices I would have been working on and gave it to me after the interview, possibly as an attempt to butter me up, because he was excited about landing me.
Many languages today share so many common roots that if you know one you know enough of the others to get the ball rolling. I went from strictly front end to suddenly working in Python and PHP and similar languages. If you know the basics you know enough
it's very rare that I learn something that I can't pull some knowledge from somewhere else. I think moving to frontend was the largest leap as a whole, just that I'm not coding purely for efficiency and that things are reactive, where on servers most times you want to not be reactive. (Oversimplification). Overall yeah, code is code, every language and framework has it's quirks, but learning your first one is the hardest, second one is the biggest one that you realize how languages differ, and then after that it just gets easier. I haven't learned Go though... should probably do that at some point