The Underscore Archives

On 2 Jul 2008, at 13:16, Aaron Trevena wrote:

> Necessity is the mother of invention, in a rational market (yes, I
> know they're as purely theortical as String Theory) customers pay a
> premium for stuff that they need :)

In the real world, I think they just pay a premium for stuff they  
_want_.  "Need" is another matter.  :)


> No - merely seperating business case for platform, etc from hackerly  
> interest.

I've given you a counterexample of your statement that:

> "on the whole frameworks and platforms aren't different enough for  
> any benefits to overcome the cost of relearning and implementing a  
> new project as a bunch of newbies"

The original choice of platform was a completely reasonable one at the  
time due to a business requirement.  The change of platform was due to  
the fact that the business was suffering due to the failings of that  
chosen platform, and relearning and implementing on a different  
platform turned out FAR quicker than vainly attempting to fix the  
existing platform.

If the techies in that situation were single-skilled, reimplementation  
wouldn't have been an option.  The intervention of a "jack-of-all- 
trades" made it an option.

That is where I see the value of being multi-skilled.  If all you've  
got is a hammer (eg. Perl), everything looks like a nail.


> I just happen to have found a niche that on the whole pays pretty well
> and allows me to work from home, using a tool set I've grown rather
> good with and a little fond of, but that's the means to an end...


...and that works for you... good!   Personally, I wouldn't want to  
limit myself to only doing projects in any single technology.  I  
wouldn't have been able to do many of the interesting projects I've  
done.

Some of the more interesting jobs I've done -- actually, strike that:  
ALL of the interesting jobs I've done -- have required work with more  
than one platform/language.

eg. writing custom OCR code:  that was an interesting side-project as  
part of a job that required PHP for the most part.  I looked at off- 
the-shelf stuff for Perl, PHP and Java and none of it was suitable, so  
I coded it myself in C after an abortive attempt getting Perl to do  
that kind of stuff quickly enough.

There's a chance I might end up doing some iPhone Objective-C coding  
for the same company, and they like the fact that they can throw  
anything at me (except Windows coding!)

Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://gidden.net/tom