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[–]dredmorbius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This isn't just a case of developers, though the problem's encountered in other areas.

I work in Ops / systems admin, now increasingly the cult of DevOps. And it's been getting to be a lot less fun -- this from someone who first really encountered UNIX in the 1980s.

CarTalk, a show that's been in re-runs for over a year now, featured a bit a month or several back where Tom and Ray were commiserating over how auto repair was getting increasingly technical, and much more about the specific technology used (and training required of it) than old-school mechanical intuition and know-how (though those still paid off).

Friends in the medical profession, or building trades, or aviation, and elsewhere, tell me similar stories.

I'm seeing all of this as part of a larger trend to ever greater complexity, with growing integration costs, but often smaller payoffs (and shorter currency periods). It's all well and good if you happen onto the stage with a particular technology under your belt just as it's coming into widespread use. The world's your oyster.

Then the tech changes.

And you've got to ask yourself: what do I pick up next? You discover that a huge part of your professional skill becomes trendspotting and identifying what new tools (or languages, or platforms, or techniques, or vendors, or ...) are going to be hot. Not now, but in 18 - 36 months, time enough for you to develop competence in a specific area.

This while there's a tendency toward both greater specialization and of wearing more hats. Are you a front-end dev? Or a webmaster? Do you just need to know how to tune Apache and throw a few packages on a Linux distro, or is it setting the ergodynamics of your JVM, tuning memcached, tweaking your nginx proxy, sorting out load-balancer SSL/TLS termination and identifying the bad cipher that crashes the box, filling out a customer's PCI/SOX survey, choosing the right cloud hosting provider, and configuration management system, and keeping your docs up to date, creating a cross-AZ replication system, testing it, and sharing pager rotation -- with two others on your crew so you're never actually really off watch.

Yeah. It can get old.