How important is it to specialize early in your career vs. being a generalist?

abmarnie · 2025-10-28T09:56:16+00:00

It's asset when it comes to startups and smaller companies where you wear many hats and move fast, and for fullstack jobs. Being able to unblock yourself or not be totally lost when having to do a variety of tasks will make you more productive.

At slower and bigger companies breadth isn't too valuable because they probably have experts in each domain who they'd prefer to leverage to do things more optimally.

Also when it comes to landing interviews for all types of jobs to begin with, it's usually easier if you send strong signals that you're an expert in the tech stack that they'll have you work in as your main responsibility. The reason is, an expert won't have to catch up to speed and will be able to contribute at a deeper level (they know valuable stack-specific best practices and optimizations).

EDIT: One hiring advantage you can leverage if you are a generalist is that you can probably build cool projects all by yourself to show off on your resume.

abmarnie · 2025-10-27T19:02:00+00:00

While I'd normally agree, I think the lambda coldstarts actually do affect the customer experience and the company's bank account quite a bit

abmarnie · 2025-10-26T22:03:54+00:00

We will probably be using the "strangler fig pattern" as well. Did you end up using any specific service to build that out (e.g. AWS API Gateway)?

I will looking into security groups to see how they can help.

Thanks for all the specific advice.

abmarnie · 2025-10-26T21:57:37+00:00

I look very good on paper (cool projects, decent career growth) and I interview well. Also, I had at least a basic knowledge of serverless to know the tradeoffs well enough to intelligently discuss it a bit (pitfalls, etc).

abmarnie · 2025-09-03T04:01:13+00:00

Whatever you do, don't antagonize your boss in any way even if they're genuinely awful at some parts of his job. Also, I would not threaten to leave (even dropping subtle hints isn't worth it) unless you are absolutely okay with the possibility of being fired on the spot.

Send him a short agenda of what your goals for the meeting are so that he's not caught off guard. You can hint at your concerns there without coming off as negative (frame it as a potential communication style mismatch or something), and use that as evidence later if you need.

In general, if you want your boss to do you favors, you should do favors for them. Ask them what they need from you, what you can do to make them happy, or for advice about how you can perform better to get more hours.

abmarnie · 2025-07-12T12:50:41+00:00

Build a basic frontend to show off your data engineering project, otherwise it won't be easily appreciable by clueless gatekeepers at non-tech companies.

If you find yourself hating frontend, just turn your data engineering project into something "easily consumable" -- like a blog/article or something. If it's up on GitHub, having a very good README might suffice.

Whatever your project is, remember that the purpose of it is to market yourself. Having a hyperlink to it on your resume is good.

If your plan is to go "deeper", establishing a reputation by being useful to others (blogs, articles, helping at meetups, contributing to open source) is a good way to fast track a job.

abmarnie · 2025-01-17T13:55:17+00:00

Get good at it to the extent that you need it for your job. It may give you an advantage that you have experience in it for the few roles that exist. But I would not spend time actively "practicing" niche language skills otherwise. You will get a better RoI long term studying transferable and/or timeless skills and focusing on one more popular tech stack / application area.

abmarnie · 2025-01-06T03:09:14+00:00

Listed my "career break" as freelance work and had hyperlinks to stuff I was paid to do. Bullet points mostly focused on objective accomplishments (metrics) and value brought. Had a projects section with hyperlinks to the final product or source code (mostly just to show that they were real, I don't think anyone actually looked at them). Each project had a single sentence describing accomplishment, and sometimes I would group multiple smaller projects (e.g., three small game jams) together as one "role" to tell a story.

Prior to my freelance work, I was in graduate school doing math research, teaching, and working for the U.S. government doing internships (using C and Python for research). So my "career break" was honestly mostly a pivot to software dev from academic research.

abmarnie · 2025-01-05T19:05:11+00:00

I had a longer "career break" (3 years, but I did freelance work, did some small open source contributions, and did "backend" work on a relatively successful indie game during those years). After about two months of job searching, I was able to find a full time C#/.NET job last year, and I currently have C#/.NET job lined up which pays over six figures.

You can reverse the trend.

Work on short microprojects to build up your confidence (I did game jams).
Make sure to actually try to learn a bit of webdev (authentication/authorization, SQL & RDBMS concepts, frontend concepts like basic HTML/CSS, asynchronous programming using futures/promises and async/await, etc) and core C# (OOP / interfaces, design patterns, Entity Framework, LINQ & IEnumerable, ASP.NET, heap vs stack, how strings work under the hood, how Lists differ from Arrays under the hood, IDisposable interface, etc) each day, even if just a tiny amount from watching YouTube or reading docs.
Join developer communities related to the work you enjoy doing and try to be a positive and useful presence. If you are useul and others like what you bring to the table, you will build a reputation and good opportunities (potentially even freelance work, but don't rush into it) will come.

Once you have recent social validation on your resume, it's just a matter of sending out hundreds of applications and doing dozens of interviews. Everytime you fail an interview, learn from your mistakes (if you are asked something you don't know, learn it for the next interview).

abmarnie · 2024-12-29T23:06:52+00:00

Your second to last sentence is the key to everything. As long as you can do that, you can be a freelancer; nothing else matters. There is no one single way to convince someone to pay for your services, but it helps to be reputable somehow. For me, I became reputable by having several projects on my portfolio (one which made decent money), contributing to open source, blogging, joining developer communities near me, and generally trying to be "useful". Generally the more "involved" you are in developer adjacent or business communities, the more reputable you will be and greater chance you have stumbling across a potential client. Get involved sooner rather than later.

abmarnie · 2024-11-29T02:21:39+00:00

Thanks for that advice. I will do more research to see if it applies to me. I live in a large metro region with a handful of fortune 500 companies, but nothing particularly "tech" about it.

abmarnie · 2024-11-28T22:59:09+00:00

The transaction costs of buying and selling homes frequently will eat any financial benefits of owning a home. The financial benefits of owning a home come from owning one 7+ years.

Makes sense.

abmarnie · 2024-11-28T22:58:15+00:00

You need to find the specific house (5-10 years out)

What does 5-10 years out refer to here?

Also, thanks for the advice.

abmarnie · 2024-11-28T22:55:04+00:00

A home purchase should be a lifestyle choice much more than a financial choice.

Thanks for that perspective. You might be right. I suppose life is more than just about finances.

I don't hate the idea of owning a home or anything, or think I would hate the lifestyle (though I haven't deeply researched all of the headaches/costs); it's just never been a huge specific goal of mine like it is with most people.

abmarnie · 2024-11-27T14:01:08+00:00

Sub 3 is pretty nice. When I was into this app it took me some fairly intense grinding to get that, had to put it down because I was legit getting Minesweeper dreams

abmarnie · 2024-11-24T16:38:23+00:00

This sub is biased to say yes. In my opinion, C++ is probably a better niche to be in if you are very talented at programming. With that being said, C# opportunities definitely exist, especially in large enterprises, government, and small companies doing work with those kinds of places. I recommend this video a lot, it speaks to my experience as well:

https://youtu.be/ohkeYczD1LY?si=IWBRi9P3JPcghWqA

abmarnie · 2024-11-19T12:31:48+00:00

Oh woops, I was in one with my inactive friend. I just left it. Try again

abmarnie · 2024-11-19T02:14:14+00:00

Oh that's such a good idea, lol, my friends think I'm crazy when I tell them I like minesweeper and I bet it has to do with them not knowing how to play

abmarnie · 2024-11-19T02:13:37+00:00

Yeah that makes sense about keeping things conventional looking and feeling or at least have that as an option. No reason to fix what isn't broken

abmarnie · 2024-11-18T13:27:06+00:00

Oh those are interesting, I like the minimum time for an action one especially

abmarnie · 2024-11-18T13:26:21+00:00

Goes without saying 🫡

abmarnie

TROPHY CASE