Over the following years I earned a living with Pascal and C before I peaked and became a recovering techie, but this isn’t about me and my mediocre dev skills, it’s really about the fixation on tools at the expense of ability.
I used to be a bit of a fascist about stuff like this – looking for staff who had specific skills in whatever dev environment was in vogue, but I (slowly) realised that what I should have been doing was looking for the core problem solving abilities which underpin stellar dev skills.
Over the years we’ve changed programming languages a few times and there’s always a bit of a learning curve, but I’m in the fortunate position of having a fair few staff who’ve been with me for decades and they take it in their stride. They are able to apply a core set of skills to whatever environment they need to use for a specific task.
Having gradually reduced my attention span to slightly more than a goldfish I envy their focus.
I will reveal my hypocrisy by saying that I do get slightly frustrated that many University graduates don’t have any exposure to very common platforms ( which have been around for years, certainly longer than the average degree course) – but hopefully the market will eventually dictate a change.
