I have been learning and learning new languages every now and then. Yes, I have the basic knowledge of all these languages. My question is, am I slowly becoming a Jack of all trades but a master of none?
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It's entirely possible. Sometimes I don't even feel like a Jack of all trades. I feel like because I've worked with so many different languages and only created 1 or 2 projects in them, I barely know anything about programming at all.
I hail myself as being a Java developer, but I don't remember the last time I wrote anything in Java.
I do however think it's possible to become a mixture of both. You can know one or two languages very well but also be flexible to create projects in languages you don't use often.
I have this fear sometimes. I am not a real expert in any technology, but I have a decent grasp of many. Over time, I have developed more of an expertise around browser networking, if I were to pick anything, but I'm still no expert there.
Over time, I think the goal should be to develop a "t-shaped expertise", that is, that you have a broad array of skills, but some certain area has become your greatest expertise.
I personally am more than happy to hire "generalists" as long as I think they are good learners and could develop an expertise if the situation calls for it. Anyone who is too strictly focused on one specific language or environment might be too rigid to shift when the shift needs to happen.
I have recruited mostly generalists in the past but with a programming twist they are capable of taking a more holistic approach to a problem instead of just I have to do a piece of code that compiles and pass unit tests.
There is always a need for generalists. People who would otherwise identify as strictly focused on one specific thing are also really generalists, because they have had to adopt other skills to drive their specialization. Whether your workplace can subsist solely on generalists depends on how important and technical your work is.
You can tell this in a team where the core of the team, even just one key person, lives in a very narrow band of language|environment|technology. Not because they are too rigid to shift, but because they work at the very edge of what technology can provide, whether that is performance or reliability.
Most languages|environment|technologies can do neither. If you aren't very concerned about getting the most, while taking the least, out of the hardware you are running on, your work isn't that technical. If you don't have to assure bulletproof reliability because there is a reasonable belief that downtime wouldn't put anyone's life and limb in jeopardy, it probably isn't that important.
But if there are people already doing both, why aren't we building on that expertise instead of enervating the industry with rubbish fad tech?
The underlying question is: What is the basis people bring with them and are you - as an employer - able to work with them.
The notion of "generalist" or "specialist" is bias laden in one way or the other. And if you take the dimensions of our industry, we are all at some point "specialist": tied to only a subsection of our field.
What is missing in the figure: the area of requirements, which mostly overlaps the generalist as well as the specialist.
The gaps of knowledge are uninteresting. Interesting is: "Are they willing to fill the gaps"?
I think you're building up a skill in addition to these languages - the skill it takes to fearlessly pick up a new language! It can feel like you're not mastering any one particular thing, but I find that's hard to do until you have a real reason to solve a specific problem with a specific language. If you've got basic programming knowledge in a variety of languages, you've probably got a good grasp of the abstract concepts - possibly better than if you'd stayed with just one.
Still, it's a good idea to keep an eye out for situations where you can deepen your knowledge and mastery in an area you're interested in. Try solving new problems, or implementing design patterns, rather than solving the same problems in a new language.
This is a question I have struggled with in the early part of my career. Coincidentally, this is the exact question I have been discussing in a blog series. I'm linking to these posts at the end. Read them (and watch the videos) for details. Here is the summary:
If you follow this pattern, then you become a T-shaped expert as Ben says. The top guys in the military are known as "generals".
Like every advice, this advice is contextual.
If you need more details, read these posts:
Should you specialize or generalize? What Jack Ma & Derek Sivers says about this: jjude.com/specialize-or-generalize/
The curse of everything and now: jjude.com/all-and-now/
You got 11 lives. Live to master 11 areas: jjude.com/11-lives/
I like most of these points, however for accuracy "marketing, business analysis" are not developer roles.
Right Andrew. But when you come up in career (even as a developer), these skills (marketing, especially) help you accelerate your career.
I find that generalist and specialist are the wrong axes to measure. Each is problematic. When it comes to developers I like to compare those with a deep understanding of computer science, who can pick up any language as they see fit vs. those who learn enough coding, algorithms, and data structures to pass a job interview. The later can be effective when the waters are calm, but when the storm hits (and it always does), I'll take the former every time. Scientists vs. opportunists.
The more languages u can code in the more you can shit on other people's language and cooler u will b
The "Jack of all trades but a master of none" phrase is a misnomer. It's bullshit.
Originally "Jack" or "Jack of all trades" was used as a saying for someone who was a generalist. Someone who didn't have expert level knowledge of thing things but lots of general knowledge of multiple topics. The "master of none" was later added just to turn it into an insult. So the first thing here is to drop the "master of none" as it serves no purpose but to be insulting to yourself.
Having said that, here's the rub: a "Jack of all trades" doesn't specify a depth of knowledge for each "trade" it references. Software development is incredibly complex and almost no one has what I would consider "full depth" on a topic. There are just too many abstractions. So what you may consider shallow enough to be a generalist, someone else may consider deep enough to be a specialist in a specific topic. It's a vague phrase attempting to be applied to an area of immense complexity.
It just doesn't work.
Something else to consider is a "Jack of all trades" likely knows enough to be a Master or Expert at picking the correct tool or at integration whereas someone who is, say, an Expert in JavaScript may want to use JavaScript for every single job even when it's inappropriate / not a good fit.
You can pick at the author's choice of phrasing, but there is a real danger to anyone's career that he's speaking to.
I did this for most of my early career - focusing on one shiny thing after another, never really developing any depth in any one topic. This way lies madness, because you'll look up after a great many years and think "What have I actually accomplished?"
Depends on how one perceive things. For some people, it might be a win-win situation for working over a large number of technologies while others may think of it as a hold back to their careers.
There's also something to be said for new perspectives - every language/technology I've picked up has taught me things that apply to all of them. The quirks of each can shift your perspective enough to make something clear that was previously foggy. Even after I abandon something that's no longer relevant (cough...actionscript) - I know I got something out of learning it.
A generalist who loves coding is the best.
Haha I like this one.
A computer language is not like a human language. Only very few human languages share something common, so speaking a lot of them could make you a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
Computer languages instead are not only strict on their regularity, they also share something in common according to their purpose and supported dogmas.
There are, for example, C-like languages like Java, C++ and C# of that sort. C and C++ appear more robust and powerful - you can do a lot wrong with them. But they share rules among each other which makes it easy to learn across the languages.
There are also script languages like JavaScript, Ruby or Python. They have their own feature set, each of them, but they also share things in common.
You'll learn to master all the languages you learn if you understand the principles behind them. That is:
You'll learn to cluster languages among these three poles and to understand how these languages support their paradigms will make you find similarities between these languages, which makes it easier to learn a new of a similar kind, and eventually, to master them all.
There is a great book called "The pragmatic programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. In this book they say we need to learn at least one new language every year. Learning new programming languages helps us broaden our thinking. In general learning is not a bad thing. It's something good.