NYCPHP Meetup

[James Wetterau]

Mitch Pirtle says:
...
> (pulls up a stool)
> 
> I started as a 'jack of all trades, master of none.  And not just 
> languages, but jobs too - hardware engineer, warehouse inventory 
> management, truck driver for manufacturing, graphics artist/animator, 
> accounting systems migration, information security, business 
> development...  Fifteen years later I'm a 'jack of all trades, master of 
> many'.  And when many are looking for work, I'm cutting projects loose 
> for lack of time.  I credit this on my being both broad AND deep.  I 
> wouldn't change a thing if I could, as it has been a remarkable, 
> exciting, thrill-ride of a career!
...

I totally agree with this perspective.  I have a similar experience:
almost all of my applicable technical skills I learned by doing.  The
important thing is to be completely realistic and honest with your
clients and yourself about what you can and can't do.

What I find best about broadening my experience across different
fields is when experience with one thing unexpectedly pays off for
something else.  "Wait a minute, I've seen something just like this
before!" you realize, only it involved a different
language/OS/computer architecture/disk type than the one you're
dealing with *but the same general type of solution* applies in both
cases.  You could search Google all day and you'd never find the
answer because the answer comes from a parallel but different line of
work.  I love it when that happens, because the customer is really
getting what they paid for -- experience.

I also like the sense of comfort it gives you when plunging into
oddball tasks where no one's the expert, e.g. "Can you make this
25-year-old unsupported APL program running on an old mainframe using
EBCDIC character encoding work correctly with data coming from a
custom VB COM component running on NT4 that interoperates with and
relies on stored procedures in a Sybase database hosted on SunOS
4.1.4?  We upgraded the environment and something broke."  I enjoy
those kinds of questions.  There are no experts for that sort of
thing, and only breadth of experience really counts and really helps.

The cost is that it takes time to build up experience.