Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankimo
It's so hard to keep up to date AND balance a life (not to mention that when I get home and have time to sit at computer, I want to grind). There's so much new stuff constantly coming out. You're not a hotshot just because you know ORM, Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control, etc. (funny thing is that half the candidates I interview for my team don't even know those things). Nowadays it's NOSQL, node.js and the ever expanding mobile spectrum.
This is interesting - and maybe even worth its own thread. I've never really understood the people that talk about how this profession has so much to keep on top of. I actually feel like its pretty comparable to other professions - teaching, medicine, law, architecture, ... you name it and technology/research is quickly moving forward.
I've also never felt the need to stay on top of all of those things. I do enough reading to know what the newest fads are - but in terms of knowing how they work and being able to use them I trust that I'll be able to learn them once I really need to. In about 5 years of work I've found that I've completely switched development technologies/stacks about 4 times. Each time it took me a couple of days or weeks to get ramped up - but after that it was smooth sailing. I've also been lucky enough to work for companies that understand switching to new technologies/stacks requires some ramp up time so a lot of that time were paid work hours.
When recruiting new candidates we never cared about specific languages/technologies that they knew. It's just not that meaningful if you're looking to recruit good long term employees. I doubt we were the only company recruiting that way.