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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I know edofic and he's a cool guy, but man was I disappointed to find out this essay isn't about taking a laptop and traveling country to country while solving cool engineering problems remotely from random coffee shops and hotel rooms.

To be honest, I am a bit confused. Are there really people out there who don't switch stacks at a whim's notice? Whenever the job might be done better in a different technology?

This is a great time to be an expert generalist.

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>Are there really people out there who don't switch stacks at a whim's notice? Whenever the job might be done better in a different technology?

Absolutely, there are. I think hanging out on Hacker News probably skews our perception of this, but most programmers know one or two languages that they learned in school and use them for everything because that's what they know. Most people don't learn the intricacies of a bunch of different languages and platforms and choose whichever one seems suited for the job; they choose to use what they know.

If you work on sufficiently large projects or in enterprise there's a high cost in switching stacks even if a particular project could be done better in a different technology. When all your software runs on the same stack, or on a limited number of stacks, there's less friction - it's easier for people to move between stacks, it's easier for different projects to work together, it's easier to use all the libraries which have already been written etc.

Even as an individual there's considerable friction in switching imo, though it's not as insurmountable, and comes with the added benefit/fun of learning something new. The conceptual part is not that bad, and is the most interesting: learning a new language/approach/framework that takes a new general approach to things, e.g. learning a functional language for the first time. But there's a lot of more "accidental" knowledge that takes a long time to pick up and has more to do with becoming familiar with a language's/framework's idioms, warts, best practices, common pitfalls, good solutions to those pitfalls, etc.

Particularly true for debugging, at least for me. I'm a lot faster at debugging in settings where I've accumulated a lot of experience, just because there are a lot more cases where I instantly recognize exactly what's happening and how to fix it.

Oh you will be suprised!

I think that some people suffer from a fear of learning something new and pushing the boundaries of their knowledge out further.

Most companies choose a stack and keep it. Developers don't even get a say.

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