The Dulin Report

Browsable archive from the WordPress export.

Results (42)

On the role of Distinguished Engineer and CTO Mindset Apr 27, 2025 The future is bright Mar 30, 2025 2024 Reflections Dec 31, 2024 The day I became an architect Sep 11, 2024 Are developer jobs truly in decline? Jun 29, 2024 Form follows fiasco Mar 31, 2024 Thanksgiving reflections Nov 23, 2023 Working from home works as well as any distributed team Nov 25, 2022 Book review: Clojure for the Brave and True Oct 2, 2022 The Toxic Clique Sep 28, 2022 All developers should know UNIX Jun 30, 2022 Good developers can pick up new programming languages Jun 3, 2022 Java is no longer relevant May 29, 2022 There is no such thing as one grand unified full-stack programming language May 27, 2022 Best practices for building a microservice architecture Apr 25, 2022 Kitchen table conversations Nov 7, 2021 What programming language to use for a brand new project? Feb 18, 2020 On elephant graveyards Feb 15, 2020 Microsoft acquires Citus Data Jan 26, 2019 Teleportation can corrupt your data Sep 29, 2018 What does a Chief Software Architect do? Jun 23, 2018 Leaving Facebook and Twitter: here are the alternatives Mar 25, 2018 When politics and technology intersect Mar 24, 2018 The technology publishing industry needs to transform in order to survive Jun 30, 2017 Why it makes perfect sense for Dropbox to leave AWS May 7, 2016 LinkedIn needs a reset Feb 13, 2016 In memory of Ed Yourdon Jan 23, 2016 IT departments must transform in the face of the cloud revolution Nov 9, 2015 We Live in a Mobile Device Notification Hell Aug 22, 2015 What Every College Computer Science Freshman Should Know Aug 14, 2015 On Maintaining Personal Brand as a Software Engineer Aug 2, 2015 Book Review: "Shop Class As Soulcraft" By Matthew B. Crawford Jul 5, 2015 The Clarkson School Class of 2015 Commencement speech May 5, 2015 On Managing Stress, Multitasking and Other New Year's Resolutions Jan 1, 2015 Software Engineering and Domain Area Expertise Nov 7, 2014 Infrastructure in the cloud vs on-premise Aug 25, 2014 On anti-loops Mar 13, 2014 On working from home and remote teams Nov 17, 2013 Thanking MIT Scratch Sep 14, 2013 Thoughts on Wall Street Technology Aug 11, 2012 Scripting News: After X years programming Jun 5, 2012 Eminence Grise: A trusted advisor May 13, 2009

Good developers can pick up new programming languages

June 3, 2022

I have heard arguments over the years along the lines of this:

We need to use programming language X because developers proficient in this language are easier to recruit.

Developers deserve a lot more credit than that. Most developers can pick up new programming languages reasonably quickly, especially languages in the same general category used together. For example, few Java business application developers cannot know SQL, and few front-end JavaScript engineers can get away with not knowing CSS.

I was, presumably, a Java developer for roughly 18 years of my career before 2015. At a minimum, I used Java and SQL for my work, which was considered an essential requirement. I used UNIX shell scripts for automation. If I ever restricted myself to being exclusively a Java developer, I had to know at least 3 programming languages just to get my work done.

I believe that pigeonholing myself into a single programming language or a single platform would have been detrimental to my career, and I am glad I never fell into that trap. Where are, may I ask, all the Deplhi developers?

Perhaps, we shouldn’t be recruiting developers based on some single technology they know but on what they can learn and apply in the future. A generalist developer that can pick the right tool for a given taskand articulate why they made such a decision is a lot more valuable than a specialist.