Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)

Re:Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice... by RhodesianHunter on Sunday October 20, 2019 @12:50PM (#21305295)

> In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.

I think this is only true if what you're working on is simple, like crud apps.

It takes longer to be intimately familiar with a language's concurrency model, pros and cons of major libraries and frameworks and the ability to make such decisions quickly and without learning hurdles, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice... by furyofantares on Sunday October 20, 2019 @04:21PM (#21306824)

In my experience folks can be reasonably productive essentially immediately in a language they've never touched if they're diving into an existing code base. Give them a machine that's already set up like the other developers, point them at a couple easy bugs or features, do some code reviews, and yes they'll be slightly slower through this process than someone that's already familiar with the stack, but not much.

[ Parent | on HN ]