Reply To: Looking for Career Advice…

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I feel like I’ve just become a jack of all trades, apparently that’s bad these days.

Well, it’s not that “doing it all” is bad in and of itself. Many times, the problem is that you may have been “doing it all” to the point where you have a wide range of skills, but not enough in-depth knowledge in any particular area to seriously impress people.

I try and make myself at least aware of all languages, frameworks, tools and such but learning them all seems like it would be impossible. (Yet required on many job postings…)

Being aware of as much as possible is a good thing, but, again, you need to have more than “working knowledge” in at least one area. Another thing you’ll notice is that, after “specializing” in two or three areas, is that everything else will become easier to learn as well.

For example, there may be a dozen programming languages that people want you to know, and when you can only copy+paste they all seem hopelessly disparate. Once you become fairly competent and experienced with one or two, however, you’ll start to see that they’re all more alike than different.

The pattern I’m in is, learn the language/tool as you go, enough to get the job done, then move along to the next.

That sounds like the problem, to me. I couldn’t know, of course, without knowing your work, but the way you’ve described it sounds like you’re more of a “production mode” person than a “developer” or “programmer.” And no, if you’re in “production mode” all the time, then you won’t have a chance to spend time really learning anything else.