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Comment by Omnius | Hacker News Reader

Excluding chasing the shiny object (the javascript race you mentioned) lifetime learning is part of the job description. If you don't love to learn and to apply the things you have learned the tech industry really isn't for you.

Also 1-2 languages... that's really on the shallow end most devs, myself included, will learn a lot more than that and each new language is much easier to pick up then the previous ones.

However as you get more experience, at least for me, you tend to stick to a handful of languages that each cover a domain.

OO, Functional, Dynamic/static variants and a language/stack that allows fast prototyping of ideas.

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> If you don't love to learn and to apply the things you have learned the tech industry really isn't for you.

Should that be the case though?

I'm actually skeptical that a lot of the new things are actually as valuable as we think they are. We tend to allow our feelings on technology to bias our estimates on productivity. I've heard tons of developers opine at length about how some new library, language, or platform increases productivity. It usually boils down to the "niceness" of the thing and how they feel using it, or some sample project that only measures time to first deployment, and not the overall maintenance burden. None of it is ever actually measured.

Yeah 1-2 was me trying not to limit this to the guys who've been around for years. I'm probably at 4-5 and think it's common.

> If you don't love to learn and to apply the things you have learned the tech industry really isn't for you. Not everyone is in this to learn. I've been on govt contracts where a dev has been there 10-20 years and has only learned 3 languages, (and is writing the same way this year as they did 5 years ago). It is not my cup of tea (hence the past tense).

My point is, not everyone loves to learn. If you want to excel you need to constantly learn but if you get into tech and you hate to learn you'll flounder until you find a gig that will let you coast for years.

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