That guy was just optimizing for future employability, albeit in a short sighted way. Being able to talk in an interview about how you have professional experience with various tech stacks is valuable. That being said, optimizing for that at the cost of current job performance and coworker alienation is just dumb, since job performance and networking leads are more important for landing good jobs. I'm guessing this guy was a serial job hopper who had no expectation of being able to progress up the ladder at the company you were at.
> I'm guessing this guy was a serial job hopper who had no expectation of being able to progress up the ladder at the company you were at.
Sometimes folks find themselves stuck in a kind of typecast role: they're "the guy" who does "the thing" that the company needs right now-- until they don't.
In many places no one will invite typecast folks to transition to different, more interesting roles that align with their interests. Instead the person will simply be discarded when they're no longer needed for that thing they do. To get around this requires some initiative and that means not "asking for permission" to try new stuff. Sometimes it's better to just take a chance and do something new. There's a risk of cargo-culting, of course, but hey there are worse things that can happen.
Danluu, as he indicated many times, comes from workplaces where staff are paid in multiples of 100K. These are elite "end-game" jobs, not "dead-end" jobs. Such staff are very much tied-in to the performance of the company objectives (in a real sense ($$$$) not in a mission-statement sense), so yeah, these places ALREADY have resources and tech in place that are marketable in other places. There's no need for folks in those workplaces to desperately get out of some php dungeon run by a B.O.F.H petty tyrant.
> I'm guessing this guy was a serial job hopper who had no expectation of being able to progress up the ladder at the company you were at.
The magpie was practically furniture (Over a decade there). We speculated that he had buried a literal body for the CEO based on what he got away with. Shiny objects was an astute call on the part of IT guy (he was setting up another new MacBook for him)
On the other hand, at least someone was exploring new tech. In the exploration/exploitation problem, going 100% exploitation and only ever using the same boring old tech for everything is not the optimal choice either.
This is also part of the reason you find reliable reseller partners. They can burn cycles figuring out what new tech is useful and what is a waste of time so you can spend your cycles actually getting things done with cool new tech that works without wasting your company's time and money on things that have fatal flaws that aren't immediately obvious.
One reason why people hire me, is for my actual, production, experience in loads of stacks and architectures.
Actual, production experience, is, IMO, a requirement to make decisions. No-one will make a good decision to ditch or embrace, say, microservices, based on a HN conversation and a few blog-posts. Nor will they make such a decision based on papers in science journals.
But rather based on failures with monoliths, failures with microservices, successes in Rails, successes in Drupal, and failures in Rails or Drupal. (Or leptos, React, flask, whatnots). Actual felt pain, and drawn learnings. Actual celebrated successes and drawn learnings.
edit: I'll often bring that up in consultancy. "Yes, Rails is great because X and Y. But Z is a rather real danger for your case; we've been bitten by that when building FooBarLy..."
What I'm trying to say: yes, indeed, this person is also collecting experience and evidence to make future decisions on. That there's a real need, and actual benefit on trying and implementing new tech. If only because otherwise we'd still be maintaining COBOL mainframe spagetti (oh. wait...)
But I guess we misunderstand each-other.
None of them cared that I knew "a lot of stuff that isn't appropriate here".
For example, a recent gig, hired me because I'm not just another Rails "expert", but a Rails expert with Typescript experience, who built large CI/CD pipelines with containers and has built complex (is there another way?) AWS infrastructures etc.
Sometimes they need someone with that exact skill-set. In this case, they needed someone to help them move from yet another "upwork-delivered-rails-spagetti" to something that could actually be maintained.
I convinced them to drop the react/typescript frontend for now (it was terribly bolted on) and to forego building their own PaaS nightmare on AWS but instead just push to Heroku - for now.
My experience helped them make tough decisions.
Sometimes gigs hire me because I have a weird combination of experiences. But more often because my experience allows me to help them make decisions on architecture and such.
Granted, I am often hired as "senior architect" or some such. And one of the first things I do, is convince them they should never again hire an "externalm interim architect", lol.
Feels like because I didn’t work in go or python at my most recent job, I’m having trouble landing anything. (I have 5 years of golang prior to my most recent job)
My experience working in devops doesn’t seem to matter for SE positions either.
It might just be the area I live in, but I wouldn’t even know how to start looking for freelance roles that aren’t just poorly paid 3mo junior contracts.
Exploring tech is great! … for smaller projects for proofs of concept, prototypes, side projects, projects specifically for researching new technologies… heck yeah.
Just not for your prod architecture. Many late night beepers have beeped and phones lit up because the piece that holds together the two pieces that let that thing talk to the database queue monitor thing stopped working so the whole thing went down.
Maybe. Some people really are like collectors chasing the latest thing. You see this in all fields and things. Ever been to someone's house that always has the latest gear in whatever hobby they follow? There is no reason to think people won't do the same in settings other than hobbies.
