Office Space, a parody of the present or a window to the future?
The industry in its current state, and is safe to say this about any other professional industry in this current socioeconomic landscape, they want developers that can work the full stack. They want developers that have sufficient understanding of all the layers that compose a fully featured large and scalable internet application. There is a lot of demand for this at the moment.
While I prefer to have a well rounded team that I can balance each others strength's and compensate for each others weakness, not every business allows their own technical people to pick this battle especially when budget conscious people (or cheap ass project managers/hr/c-levels) have to say anything about who gets hired and are quick to drown in this fallacy of the rock star developer that does an entire Facebook in his basement for free.
I have wrestled many years with the internal conflict of which path is more satisfactory. Do I try to become capable on every single technology I come across or do I keep a specialization over a core set of time tested skills?
This post has been years in the draft queue, cause I was, at the time, worried too much about what skill sets I lacked or what should I focus on in terms of useful technology and software development skills. Hell, I don't think the title matches anymore what I was actually thinking about at the time when it drove me to start the draft. But, I'm just going to put this out there because, as things change (and they should, for the better, constantly change) you have to be ok with changing direction drastically. Most people repeat phrases like "oh you're so great never change" and I think its completely wrong. I like who I am, but I don't want to stay the same.
Regarding the Office Space quip, it has been now quite apparent to me from some time, that even fiction cant hold a candle to the real world absurdities of traditional white collar office work in general, and software development or technology industry in particular. Its a huge joke, to work in most places. Hell, employment in general. And employment in particular is less of a smart life choice. Work/life balance is non existent, salaries are stagnant, work and productivity has skyrocketed for the individual yet those gains are never reflected in our bank accounts. A lot of people see this and stop being interested in employment all together. Internet opinion havers start throwing terms around like "the gig economy" and "side hustle", to dumb down the definition of a crisis in the way we earn our keep and not die in the streets for lack of food and shelter.
In the tech industry, this crisis is highly pronounced and I think is one of the worst offenders of this new shit default state economy. While there are some sectors healthier than others, with some semblance of gainful well paid employment, past a certain point of a productive career there is a ceiling. No one is going to pay you more for doing the same thing better, and worse, no one wants to pay you more for being more productive or "working more hours".
Software is about putting complex circuits to work for you in such a way that productivity exponentially grows and humans work less, but all we find is that we keep working more. For me as an individual, there are some changes in the equation that need to happen so that I no longer get paid because of some bullshit list of skills I have that I may or may not use during X amount of hours.
I guess that gets a point across. Writing is healthy and I should do it more, even if I keep getting increasingly busy, I should accept that this always busy default state is just something of a copout for not getting around to do certain things. Because that wont change, I don't have a procrastination problem (not anymore at least, I have outgrown and left behind those problems) but I do have a "what out of the hundreds of things I want to do I should be doing" problem.
While I prefer to have a well rounded team that I can balance each others strength's and compensate for each others weakness, not every business allows their own technical people to pick this battle especially when budget conscious people (or cheap ass project managers/hr/c-levels) have to say anything about who gets hired and are quick to drown in this fallacy of the rock star developer that does an entire Facebook in his basement for free.
I have wrestled many years with the internal conflict of which path is more satisfactory. Do I try to become capable on every single technology I come across or do I keep a specialization over a core set of time tested skills?
This post has been years in the draft queue, cause I was, at the time, worried too much about what skill sets I lacked or what should I focus on in terms of useful technology and software development skills. Hell, I don't think the title matches anymore what I was actually thinking about at the time when it drove me to start the draft. But, I'm just going to put this out there because, as things change (and they should, for the better, constantly change) you have to be ok with changing direction drastically. Most people repeat phrases like "oh you're so great never change" and I think its completely wrong. I like who I am, but I don't want to stay the same.
Regarding the Office Space quip, it has been now quite apparent to me from some time, that even fiction cant hold a candle to the real world absurdities of traditional white collar office work in general, and software development or technology industry in particular. Its a huge joke, to work in most places. Hell, employment in general. And employment in particular is less of a smart life choice. Work/life balance is non existent, salaries are stagnant, work and productivity has skyrocketed for the individual yet those gains are never reflected in our bank accounts. A lot of people see this and stop being interested in employment all together. Internet opinion havers start throwing terms around like "the gig economy" and "side hustle", to dumb down the definition of a crisis in the way we earn our keep and not die in the streets for lack of food and shelter.
In the tech industry, this crisis is highly pronounced and I think is one of the worst offenders of this new shit default state economy. While there are some sectors healthier than others, with some semblance of gainful well paid employment, past a certain point of a productive career there is a ceiling. No one is going to pay you more for doing the same thing better, and worse, no one wants to pay you more for being more productive or "working more hours".
Software is about putting complex circuits to work for you in such a way that productivity exponentially grows and humans work less, but all we find is that we keep working more. For me as an individual, there are some changes in the equation that need to happen so that I no longer get paid because of some bullshit list of skills I have that I may or may not use during X amount of hours.
I guess that gets a point across. Writing is healthy and I should do it more, even if I keep getting increasingly busy, I should accept that this always busy default state is just something of a copout for not getting around to do certain things. Because that wont change, I don't have a procrastination problem (not anymore at least, I have outgrown and left behind those problems) but I do have a "what out of the hundreds of things I want to do I should be doing" problem.
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