Tim Roberts wrote:
Let's be honest, once you know how programming languages work, learning
a new one is not a gigantic task. What I want is someone that CAN be
trained.
Sadly, while this used to be true as little as 5 years ago, it is
rapidly becoming less and less true. The more that the language is
irrelevant and the frameworks and libraries do all the real work in a
real program, the more important it's going to be for people to
specialize in those, simply because of the shear massive complexity of
those frameworks.
.NET is like this, the perl (and other scripting language) libraries are
like this, Java is like this, and a lot of the web languages are quickly
becoming like this. Heck, even Win32 is like this to a significant degree.
Just about the only areas where specialized experience/knowledge isn't
that important any more are things like device drivers where the
language is really nothing more than a means to the end of doing the
low-level tasks in the code itself.
I fear that the generalist programmer is a dying breed except perhaps
for systems and embedded software. It's already true that a job
requirement like "x years experience with the .NET framework" is
significantly more than an HR filter, and is approaching an actual
requirement.
And of course, if all you can practically do is systems and embedded
software, you're not really a generalist anymore...
Ray
(If you want to reply to me off list, please remove "spamblock." from my
email address)