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I have been working for my current employer for more than 5 years now. I like the workplace as my manager is nice to me and I have some level of freedom in terms of development. Only thing is being the only developer in a team I have to do most of the development work.I joined them as a .NET developer but now doing lot of other dev work. Development team's size is 2 including my manager (he works on other technologies like EDI and Java and keep people away from bugging me too much.) for a company of 800+. Over the years team has gone down in size from 5 to 2 due to redundancies. Some work gets outsourced to other agencies but most of the time it is in-house development. At the moment I do report development,any .NET based application development, ERP customization, cloud integration development, sometime java development and now getting into Salesforce development and soon will be doing some OCR development as well. Too many diverse technologies each with its own tool set. It feels like wearing too many hats. I am not complaining as I can manage all this at the moment.
Just curious to know,How many hats are you wearing ?
Zen and the art of software maintenance : rm -rf *
Maths is like love : a simple idea but it can get complicated.
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My current job does not ask me to wear these many hats (for now). I am sticking to MS technologies and RDBMS databases. I just need to do some estimations, architecture, design, development and some testing. I am not really limited to one thing in MS technologies. I do desktop, web, services and reports.
My previous job was extremely diverse compared to this. I was dealing with VB6, .Net framework (both web and windows), SAP, OPC, range of ETL tools, consulting, documentation, deployments and whatever else comes to mind. We were 3 people team when I started so we had to do everything ourselves.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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You sound like a government worker, such as I. My agency is around 4000, but because of silos, my department only has 4 developers, but only myself and a woman contribute anything.
The hats I wear are .Net developer (mostly web forms), SSIS, system administration, SQL Server DBA, SSRS reports, Open Office reports, Oracle PL/SQL, and even a little Oracle DBA work in a Linux environment. My last little project was a purge of 10 years of records from an Oracle database, along with 100 GB of attached documents on a network share. It wasn't too bad doing it in SSIS, but the sleeplessness comes from the potential disaster of having to roll everything back and restore the Oracle schema in a Linux environment. The previous big project was SSIS and the next project, which will be super cool, starting in about 6 months, will be a .Net Core web application. So I'm crossing my fingers at the potential of some fun and gratifying development.
The problem with this is I used to be a really good lead developer, but now I wear so many hats, my skill set has become watered down. I've only done 1 small MVC app and nothing for mobile. I don't study much anymore, because I feel it is for naught, though I do hit CP quite often; which is good. I do make good money, but I have become trapped in an organization that I do not like and cannot leave because it is too much of a risk. I am thinking of doing the .Net certifications for .Net Core starting this spring so maybe I can market myself and try and find a more fulfilling position at another company.
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Tony Foo wrote: I don't study much anymore, because I feel it is for naught
Learning on your own with technologies you're interested in should never be for naught. At the very least it demonstrates your ability to learn outside of a forced environment which is a skill often overlooked imho. How HR views this I haven't the slightest but anyone even mildly competent in a language/framework will recognize the ability of someone who's competent in multiple. Think of it this way: the more languages/frameworks you're comfortable (or previously experienced) with the greater chance of getting out of a job you seem to dislike 
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I have a different point of view when it comes to learning some other technology that I am not really using at work.
So, I did some training and certifications for some cloud providers. But reality is that I have never used them professionally. Now, I might as well put certifications on my resume but it holds no real value IMHO.
So, unless I get a proper road map for near future, I intend not to dive in to new technologies. May be it is just me, but I forget things entirely if I don't use them.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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From my point of view, it's something that is done to satisfy a personal demand. You want to learn, you learn, maybe it gets you a job, maybe it doesn't. From the point of view of someone looking to change jobs, you can either show work in that new area supplemented by tangential experience to help your case or do nothing. Either way unless satisfied in your current area and uninterested in others, learning new technology is beneficial 
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Thanks. I love .Net development and used to study or write my own stuff most nights of the week, up until a few years ago when I started wearing a lot of different hats. Web development got me interested in IT nearly 20 years ago, but what I did not say is that I worked 6 to 7 days a week on a reporting project since July with a deadline of January. It was a failed project that was dropped on me by the execs and I was told to be the PM and lead. It was not a lot of fun, to say the least; plus I get to do my System and DBA tasks as well. I'm currently burned out, but starting to freshen a bit and read articles again. We'll see; hopefully the passion will come back.
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You don't also play PowerShell guru for the organization, security analyst, SysAdmin, and modernization advocate?
Lucky government employee :p
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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I decide the technologies on the Microsoft side and do some system administration, but not hardware. No Powershell, I can get along without it, but do still use RoboCopy a lot.
I am not lucky being a government employee. I am slightly above average, but no where near a guru. The government employees that are lucky are the ones that don't want more at work or in life. I want more and I have ambition; so I rant from time to time because government jobs can be very depressing.
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No, but you're lucky FOR a government employee, in that you have less hats to wear than I do :p
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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There aren't enough hats going round to cover the number I try [/forced] to wear, that's the downside of being boss on the facility. There aren't even hats that cover some of the stuff I have to get involved with.
Makes for a very interesting job at times.
The best hat however is the "I am on time off for 3 weeks hat" that I get to wear for 6 months of the year. 
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Two: The Freelancer and the Job Seeker.
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The most appropriate adornment for my mazard would be a crash helmet.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Try being a freelancer. Before you even think about development, you're also doing marketing, sales, accounting, legal, payroll, office management, cleaning, catering, networks, security, op.systems, hardware + software procurement and a load more jobs beside.
Sounds like you're doing one job - development. Sure, there are different toolsets involved but the mindset is similar. Seems you have great variety at work with never a dull moment
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... as many hats as I am possessing rulers ...
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Can anyone recommend a decent JavaScript book for the total beginner?
If it's not broken, fix it until it is.
Everything makes sense in someone's mind.
Ya can't fix stupid.
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I don't have any book recommendations but the MDN JavaScript[^] page has excellent tutorials. It's where I learned initially. Just go down that list on the left side starting with "Javascript Guide."
modified 2-Mar-17 18:47pm.
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Awesome. Thanks!
If it's not broken, fix it until it is.
Everything makes sense in someone's mind.
Ya can't fix stupid.
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Holy sh*t, I think I've been a Microsoft code monkey for way too long. I actually read that link as "MSDN JavaScript", and then freaked out when the link took me to a mozilla page. 
On the other hand, thanks very much for posting it. I will go through the page as well. 
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Haha, I've done that as well. I started out on C/C++, went to Perl, then to C# and all its related technologies. I actually started learning web development last since now everything seems to be web-integrated. MSDN and MDN are still probably my two most-viewed domains
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Been outside of the MS ecosystem for a while now, but I read the link as MSDN as well. On the second look I realized it's Mozilla docs
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Nice link - thanks, Jon!
/ravi
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I started studying it back in the 90s, so anything I can say is a bit dated. However, "back in the day" I read the first edition of the JavaScript Bible, and it was pretty darn good. It's up to the seventh edition now, but I'd suspect it's still a quality book.
JavaScript Bible[^]
Jeremy Falcon
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Thanks for that!
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