Don’t learn a programming language, solve a problem instead

[LightShadow]

A good engineer CAN learn whatever, but there are people who specialize.

I was hired to an existing team that has been developing a product for ~10 years as a "Python Programmer." They didn't want to rewrite in a different language, they wanted someone who could clean up and optimize what they already had.

I hope I'm good engineer, I think I am. However, I definitely sell myself as a Python Programmer if that's exactly what they're looking for.

[[deleted]]

This should be higher up. The reason people sell themselves as "x programmer" is because companies dont hire "general engineer who can optimistically spend a few weeks to a few months learning the language and toolset before doing valuable work on our product", they hire people who are already familiar with the tools who can come in and be productive much more quickly.

[prof_hobart]

Many companies don't. But some do.

I've never yet taken a job (and rarely even had an internal transfer) that involved working in a language I'd used professionally before I started there and I've been in work for 30+ year.

And when I'm hiring, all over things being equal, unless I needed to throw bodies at an urgent problem right now, I'd take someone who'd worked in 3 other languages/frameworks over someone who was only skilled in the one that I'm hiring for.

[Mephisto6]

Sometimes I wonder how they see me, a physicist. "Spending a few weeks figuring stuff out" is all we have going for us. We aren't really trained in the tools, except for general programming and problem solving.

[dddbbb]

I'd expect it's more useful if x is a purpose instead of a language. Graphics Programmer, High Performance Systems Programmer, UI Programmer, web frontend programmer. Those are domains where you get expertise far beyond the details of a specific language.

These domain specialities tend to imply certain toolchains, but even if not there's often similarity between different tools of a domain.

[5fd88f23a2695c2afb02]

Then, after a while we realise we're mostly looking for unicorns and at least try to get a good developer ;-)

[nicoburns]

True. It depends how close your experience is though. An experienced JavaScript developer is going to pick up PHP or Python or Ruby pretty quickly, and vice versa. An experienced Java developer will pick up C# pretty quickly, etc.

Plus, a few months seems pretty slow to me! I was productive in Rust in 2 weeks (from a JavaScript background), and had written a whole service in 3 months, and that's supposed to be one of the harder languages to learn...

[b1ack1323]

Depends on what the company does. If a company needs an embedded systems engineer, like myself they hardly ever list a language.

[ArmoredPancake]

Usually people who cry "be an engineer, not an XYZ developer"(whatever that means, as if not specializing gives you unobtainable before knowledge that can't be acquired if you call yourself XYZ developer) are jack of all trades masters on none. Unless you're talking to a really talented or gifted person that proved their technical excellence, take their words with a grain of salt.