Of course I’m not a language, I’m a framework. Never mind “Java,” am I Spring or am I Struts?<p>Never mind “Ruby,” am I Rails 2.x or 3.x?<p>—<p>This may seem tongue-in-cheek, but regardless of how we see ourselves, ignoring how others see us is an exercise in frustration:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html</a>
Defining yourself by your languages also encourages the guys with money to consider you a trivially substitutable commodity, equivalent to any other "resource" with the same keyword set. You probably don't want that.
A good hacker can pickup a new language quickly, maybe half hour, or 1 day, or three days for complex ones. But also usually with each language, comes a set of tools and practices, that take a bit more time to become proficient with, and are also necessary to reach a high levels of productivity.<p>Recruiters expectations varies on each market situation. In my experience, as a freelancer doing remote work, few if any hiring companies are willing to wait that time. You are mostly required to have demonstrable high quality concrete experience in the specific tools to be used.<p>Various factor are involved in this situation. Among these, one thing is that is difficult to identify good hackers. Also, hiring the wrong person can be very costly for a company.<p>Hackers have to send the right signals, to surpass these barriers. Some are lucky, and their careers give them the right opportunities. Others doesn't have that luck, and must put an "special" extra effort, to be able to advance and get these "best opportunities".
I am not a language, but I have a certain taste in languages.<p>While I am somewhat capable of coding in Java or C, I just enjoy the Ruby community, the podcasts, the expressiveness of the language and the approach to solving problems way more than I do with the respective C/Java equivalents.<p>I am not a language, but I'd like to chose the tools that make me happy.
Lots of opportunities claim to be a chance to work on interesting problems together with other smart people. Filtering opportunities is hard. Filtering by language is flawed, but what better techniques are there?
No, but it's a pretty useful signal. If you want someone who can build you an iPhone app, asking for an Objective-C programmer gets you 75% of the way there, and calling yourself an Objective-C programmer is more likely to get you the damn job than calling yourself a "smart, informed Hacker News reading hipster".
Thoughtful and interesting. This post makes me second guess myself.<p>As a counter point: I wonder if this is a personal decision. Some people are interested in deep mastery and some people are interested in broad mastery.
You know, it's great to <i>say</i> that, but the vast amount of job postings are asking for a keyword set oriented around languages and frameworks.<p>One optimizes for what is apparently selected for.