A couple years back a client asked me to review a tech stack and to help them build it. One tool stood out as an odd choice and I suspected the engineering team was resume padding.<p>I looked at their scaling needs, costs, experience, existing stacks, and user stories but I couldn't work out why they included it. I pitched an alternate that delayed introducing the tool (it would be clear later on if it was needed, and it looked easy to delay). I got an enthusiastic but substanceless rebuttal from the engineering team. I ended up including the tool, as I needed the engineering team on-board to make design changes. In retrospect I still think they made a poor choice. I guess it worked out though as my resume was similarly padded?
No.<p>(1) I have often gotten jobs in languages I didn't have experience with. I had my <i>Annus Mirablis</i> where I worked at a failing web design shop where I worked on about 70 web sites in a random list of technologies, then went to work for a competitor on GWT and Cold Fusion projects (I am little scared to say that because there was a time that saying that or Sharepoint would get recruiters to jump on me in public) and then got a C# job on the strength of my Java and other experience.<p>I had some terrible experiences with Python early on and was really skeptical but there was a time as a consultant where the work I could get was data science work in Python so other people paid me to get up to speed with Python and became a fan.<p>(2) I have had times when I was not so interested in side projects and blogging about them but when I have had picked up side projects at the leading edge of the industry that have had recruiters and others looking for me. Often these projects have had both fashionable and unfashionable elements (interest in knowledge-based AI got work in IR and neural networks, now I am working on content-based recommendation which people just 'haven't gotten' for 20 years but that has gotten me to upgrade my NLP toolbox with LLMs and I think there will be a moment when people get that algorithms in social media are not bad but it is algorithms somebody else controls is bad)
While I have preferences that are generally respected, I'm still forced to work on whatever work digs up for me. In my spare time where I have the mental energy to still write code, I'm working on things I want to work on using whatever tools I feel like. If they're useful for my resume, great, if not, oh well.<p>I learned a lesson when trying to create my personal website using GatsbyJS, thinking it would be a great resume builder for future web dev roles. I found that framework massively frustrating. I rewrote the whole site in pure HTML and CSS (no JS at all), and deployed with a few shell scripts. I love working on my site now, it's beautiful and simple.
No, I want to do resume-driven development.<p>My professional goal has <i>always</i> been to find the parts of work I like the most, find a way to excel at that work, put it on my resume, pivot that resume into a new job that focuses <i>more</i> on what I enjoy.
No, but all of my side projects are work related things, and it has occurred to me that if I ever leave my company those projects will not help my github. I still do them anyway because I am most excited to build them.