I agree with one important caveat. Every developer should know more than language/product at each part of the stack well, and have built a non-trivial project in it, not to check items off on their resume, but to broaden their understanding.
In my experience one-trick ponies tend to be blind to the limitations of their preferred platform and often unnecessarily opinionated. If you love Ruby on Rails, go build something in Django or Node. If you like Angular, go try out React or Vue.
Every language and platform has its strengths and weaknesses and it's important to know both. In fact, one of the questions I ask people in the pre-interview screening is: "What's your favorite platform. What are three things you like the most about it? What are three things you dislike the most about it?". The best developers tend to have solid answers for both halves of the question.
Of course, once you have enough exposure to different ways of doing things, there are greatly diminishing returns.
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
I'm not arguing against learning multiple languages or stacks.
Everyone has a limited amount of time to devote to learning and all I'm proposing is that people think about what would benefit them the most and learn that instead of blindly following something misquoted from a book written almost 20 years ago.
I didn't think you were, I just wanted to explicitly make the point that learning a second language is hugely beneficial. I agree that trying to learn one every year is pretty misguided.
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
I agree with one important caveat. Every developer should know more than language/product at each part of the stack well, and have built a non-trivial project in it, not to check items off on their resume, but to broaden their understanding.
In my experience one-trick ponies tend to be blind to the limitations of their preferred platform and often unnecessarily opinionated. If you love Ruby on Rails, go build something in Django or Node. If you like Angular, go try out React or Vue.
Every language and platform has its strengths and weaknesses and it's important to know both. In fact, one of the questions I ask people in the pre-interview screening is: "What's your favorite platform. What are three things you like the most about it? What are three things you dislike the most about it?". The best developers tend to have solid answers for both halves of the question.
Of course, once you have enough exposure to different ways of doing things, there are greatly diminishing returns.
I'm not arguing against learning multiple languages or stacks.
Everyone has a limited amount of time to devote to learning and all I'm proposing is that people think about what would benefit them the most and learn that instead of blindly following something misquoted from a book written almost 20 years ago.
I didn't think you were, I just wanted to explicitly make the point that learning a second language is hugely beneficial. I agree that trying to learn one every year is pretty misguided.
Cool. It's hard to communicate clearly in comments.
Cheers.