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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Technical Idiot Savants
Feed Title: Jared's Weblog
Feed URL: http://www.jaredrichardson.net/blog/index.rss
Feed Description: Jared's weblog.
The web site was created after the launch of the book "Ship It!" and discusses issues from Continuous Integration to web hosting providers.
Andy Hunt gave a talk Thursday night in Reston, Virginia called Refactoring Your Wetware. I got a chance to review the slides before he went and it got me thinking... sounded like it would be a great talk by the way!
Some developers let their company put them in a niche. They learn so much of the company's internal technology that they lose touch with their industry at large. They become very good at a very small set of technologies.
This is a very bad thing for both the company and the developer.
As a developer, you have gained a great many non-transferable job skills. When you decide to move, or when the company lays you and 10,000 other poor souls off, you'll be unemployable. From a personal point of view, this is a very bad situation.
It's also bad for your company. There are a great many smart and talented people across this world and they are doing clever things. Are you learning about the clever things people are doing? Did you know about the ideas behind AJAX before AJAX became a buzzword? Or do you know what AJAX is now? :)
My point is that if you keep informed about your industry in general, you'll continue to learn. And you'll bring that knowledge back to your day job where you'll apply the new ideas. Instead of solving problems yourself, you'll read about how some other smart people solved the same problem.
It comes down to pulling your head up from your work from time to time and looking around at the landscape. You may be working very hard building your road, but are you headed in the right direction? Do you see the canyon ahead that you'll want to avoid?
Don't let you company train you to become a technical idiot savant who can do one thing so very well but is useless for anything else. It may occur naturally in some people, but in developers, it's a learned trait!
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