Have you ever came across the unpleasant feeling of being forced to learn something you are not fully a fan of, cause you simply did not have another choice?
The reasons for this might vary, including specific job opportunities in your area, particular work culture in some organizations, or jumping into some continuous legacy projects...
Did you try to present some alternatives and how it all resolved?
Latest comments (39)
I was an intern and had to learn React and Redux, even though I'm more of a back-end profile. I decided to go ahead with it, even though I disliked it fiercely. With the entire project well underway there was no way I could have suggested any change. So I ended up learning React.
In the end I view it as a positive. It is a skill highly in demand and I know that if I need, I can brush it up and find some work. I still try to avoid it though.
I was forced to learn TypeScript while being sceptical about it.
Ended up liking it a lot and I'm an advocate now!
I was forced to use RPC over REST which was all the hype at the time, ended up broadening my horizons and being less of a "hammer/nail" person.
My uni teacher forced us to learn proper usage of Microsoft Word = using styles, ended up super-useful!
I had to work a lot with SWT (old UX toolkit for Java) and other Java Desktop App stuff.
In the end, I changed my job.
MATLAB. There’s nothing Python can’t do which MATLAB can [except some complex spectral transformations with imaginary numbers]. It also has very involved syntax and is heavy
Yeah javascript.
Then you are so-backend unless you use nodejs.
Not really. I can still use html. Thymeleaf, velocity templates for server side rendering to the front end.
Not to mention in the back end I'm not limited. I can use java, Python, bash, and a plethora of other technologies.
I'm still not giving in. I do not want to learn node.js, but it's all you guys ever talk about!
But seriously - Joomla, wordpress, .NET (which is funny because I started out as a VB programmer, and loved asp). It's like every freelancer job I ever did was using tech I had never seen before that I suddenly had to become the expert in.
Advice - learn to say NO.
Thankfully, I get to decide what tech I use now.
Not saying it's applicable to you, but sometime external pressure is needed to broaden one's comfort zone, cf. my answer.
So... learn to say YES!
I learned Java in college and used it in my first job. Then that job acquired a PHP application and I had to learn it to support the development. Because I was the most junior at the time, they couldn't make anyone else do it. Then a year later, that company was acquired by a big tech company that ran primarily on PHP and as one of three PHP devs on the team, my growth jumped. I stopped hating it after the first couple months and ended up doing that as my primary work for the next 9 years. At the end of the day, they're all just tools.
It happened to me with Ruby on Rails. I was a mobile dev and was encouraged to learn so I could help out with backend/web development at the company I was working at the time.
I only knew a little NodeJS at the time so server stuff wasn’t 100% new for me, but I was a bit hesitant at first. Turns out I absolutely loved it and I’m still coding in Rails to this day (4+ years ago 😅). I’m still grateful for the chance I was given to learn something new at that job.
I guess you really only know if you’ll like/hate it until you give it a shot! I would definitely recommend against going with anything outside of your interests if you’re clear in what you want, otherwise experiment as much as possible if you have the chance because you never know what might surprise you
How can you truly be against something without knowing it?
I'm grateful for the time with the technologies I don't like, because that how I learned what problems arise, and above all, how big problems they really are.
Some problems are also well worked-around in some environments. For instance, while Python doesn't enforce function return types, developers keep them consistent. In PHP, I've had functions that would return completely different things depending on a parameter, making it hell to debug.
Very easily. I dont know how it feels to kill somebody with a hammer, but im strongly against it and i never want to know.
It takes a little bit of predictive thinking and research, but with a little bit of effort most things you can predict if you want to do or not.
The hammer analogy is poor: you can very easily gather enough information to make up your mind. An extreme example is food, where it's very hard to predict whether you'll like something, and trying it is usually the only way to find out.
Technology isn't a consumable, not is it a hardware tool.
If something is very spicy, i know i dont want to find out.
If something is very sweet, i dont want to try it.
If something is made from ...
Ah... because of money, I had to learn programming stuffs. I wish I would still have time to relearn Physics, multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Electrical Circuits, Thermodynamics, Control Engineering... I have eBooks on these subjects, but time and energy preclude me from doing that.