Filling your stack
With the increasing dynamism in the job market, most organisations try to find full stack developers so that they can fit in any person anywhere with inadequate learning time. In response, developers rush towards filling their stack.
How exactly do you fill your stack?
Sounds like a preparing a buffet meal at home all by yourself. Firstly you need to learn and master multiple cuisines, spend hours cooking, exploit all available resources at home to make a meal which can satisfy any possible consumer.
If you are able to do it!! Kudos amazing chef, you are great!!
How often do you need to satisfy the palate of such a wide range of guests. On a day to day basis what are the skills that will help you survive. A reasonably good meal, prepared on time, with desired quality and that leaves behind a tidy workplace. This all that is required for an everyday survival. In pursuit of preparing a wide spread, have we ignored the basic skills like optimal use of resources, timeliness and clean workplace?
Are we doing the same at our work place?
Every project offer many learnings over and beyond the Tech stack. Some simple coordination skills like daily stand-ups, Dev-QA sync ups, reporting blockers, reporting defects and so on. Some code quality skills like testable code, reusable code, clean code, developer level performance monitoring and so on. Also few enterprise level skills like conflict management, staffing decisions and so on.
When you frequently hop between project or organisations in pursuit of new and evolving technology, your stack does get filled more technologies, however you lose on the opportunity to learn optimal application of those. Any skill technical or otherwise gains value when applied on ground under the real-time restricting and conflicting scenarios.
As they say learnings is a continuous process, while you continue to learn new skills and technologies, don’t miss learning through experience.
One last thought. Make sure the years you add to your resume reflects the depth in experience as you work on the breadth.
