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I welcome the challenge to be forced into learning new things that are outside of my expertise.

I'm a backend dev and a few years ago the company pivoted and put almost all the engineering team on building a new React app. I'd never done React. It took me some time to learn it, and I'm still bad at making things look pretty. The skill will be valuable when I look for another job. Now I can apply for Full Stack positions and not just the backend positions.

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While I enjoy learning stuff that's out of my expertise, I do worry about whether or not being a generalist is more of a hindrance as both the backend and frontend have a LOT of ways one could expand their mastery. There is a bit of zero-sum in this as the hours I spent outside of work learning Go/Rust/Postgres for more understanding of the backend could've been spent on diving deeper into frontend things like performance optimization and web accessibility.

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