{"id":10576,"date":"2018-02-20T11:31:08","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T17:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daedtech.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=10576"},"modified":"2020-01-07T12:52:12","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T18:52:12","slug":"tech-stack-framework-library-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daedtech.com\/tech-stack-framework-library-api\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Stack, Framework, Library or API: How Not to Specialize"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, I’m going to keep plugging away with another mid-week post in the developer to consultant series<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To recap, I’ve talked recently about how you need to start by figuring out your positioning<\/a>\u00a0and then about how that positioning should orient around problem solving instead of laboring<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, I’m going to build on that momentum.\u00a0 I’m going to talk about the positioning mistake you’re almost certainly going to make and how to avoid it.<\/p>\n

The Positioning Mistake<\/h2>\n

You’re going to try to position yourself around a tech or tech stack.\u00a0 “I help people with blockchain” or “I’m a Ruby on Rails performance expert.”\u00a0 Now, this isn’t as bad as the generalist career approach<\/a>, to be sure.\u00a0 But it’s really not where you want to go, either.<\/p>\n

I’ll get to why<\/em> in a moment.<\/p>\n

But first, let me just say that it’s completely understandable why you gravitate toward this.\u00a0 Our industry pushes you that way with an aircraft carrier’s worth of momentum.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You should be a generalist and compete with 18,000,000 other programmers<\/a> to be “the best” and get hired at SiliconPrestigeTech.\u00a0 Not for you?\u00a0 Well, fine.\u00a0 Then get better than everyone else at some tiny piece of technical real estate.\u00a0 Everything in your experience pushes you this way.<\/p>\n

Indulge me for a moment.<\/p>\n

I’m going to force one of my parables on you to demonstrate the absurdity of this situation.\u00a0 And then I hope this will serve as your compass to navigate your way out of the generalist quagmire.<\/p>\n

I once wrote a post about what it would be like if contractors behaved like programmers<\/a>.\u00a0 This is going to be a bit like that, but doctors are knowledge workers, so it illustrates the point a bit better.\u00a0 And I’m going to emphasize a different set of specifics.<\/p>\n

Walter White, His Doctor Recruiter, and His Doctor Manager<\/h2>\n

My wife and I have been watching Breaking Bad<\/a> again over the last month.\u00a0 It’s not a spoiler if I tell you that the main protagonist, Walter White, receives a cancer diagnosis (it’s the premise of the show).\u00a0 Lung cancer, and an aggressive form at that.\u00a0 So let’s imagine Walter in a world where doctors acted like programmers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The first thing that Walter would need to do is to hire two people for his “diagnose and treat my cancer” project.\u00a0 These would include a doctor recruiter and a doctor manager.<\/p>\n

The doctor manager would sit with Walt, listen to his symptoms, and lay out a roadmap of what comes next.\u00a0 Now, this doctor manager “isn’t medical” so he would need to enlist doctors to perform the actual diagnosis.\u00a0 But he’s “medical adjacent” enough to at least know which doctors to call.<\/p>\n

Of course, he’s too busy and important to make those calls, so he enlists the doctor recruiter to do that, explaining that he needs someone with at least 7 years of CT scan, 5 years of X-Ray, 6 years Sputum Cytology, 4 years of Biopsy, with strong Bedside Manner skills a plus.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We Need a Team of Full Stack Doctors to Treat This Thing<\/h2>\n

The doctor recruiter recruits and the doctor manager hires, and he then supervises the diagnosis.\u00a0 The worst news comes back.\u00a0 It’s cancer.<\/p>\n

Now the doctor manager needs to grow the team.<\/p>\n

Diagnostic skills continue to matter, but now Walt needs a different set of skills as well.\u00a0 The doctor manager understands how this works, so he puts out the word.\u00a0 He needs one or more people with:<\/p>\n