Great to see that big VCs are having these deep insights.
As a developer, I've essentially had to leave the industry because all the small software companies are constantly coercing all their developers into using specific tools and processes from big tech companies and unicorn startups and I was constantly pushed towards solutions which are too bureaucratic to work efficiently in a small company setting.
I was too passionate about coding to butcher it in this way so I left the professional sector and focused on open source (thankfully I have enough side income to do this). It's mental torture to come to work every day, working in an industry which is supposedly all about logic and problem solving and be constrained by what is essentially religious dogma when applied in context.
10 years ago, it was such fun to be in the software industry as a developer. The company directors would trust you to choose any stack/framework you wanted or even build your own lightweight in-house framework (or no framework at all). It's no longer the case.
Weirdly one of the reasons I moved from development to a test engineering role is you have way more technical freedom. I can basically use whatever tool I want because there’s way less oversight as long as the job is done. Want to test a CLI? Use Go/Rust. Want to load test a website? Use Scala. Data parsing? Write a lexer in Haskell. I think I’ve used almost every language in the top 30 in production thanks to this. And it’s not even just language - need reporting? Try a new web framework. Need to store data between tests? Try a new database.
I’ve written far more fun code in a testing role than I ever could in a dev role :)
Sounds like you found a good way to keep learning on the job. This approach wouldn't work for me though because I like building products and features. The way I kept learning was by doing open source on the side.
I was too passionate about coding to butcher it in this way so I left the professional sector and focused on open source (thankfully I have enough side income to do this). It's mental torture to come to work every day, working in an industry which is supposedly all about logic and problem solving and be constrained by what is essentially religious dogma when applied in context.
10 years ago, it was such fun to be in the software industry as a developer. The company directors would trust you to choose any stack/framework you wanted or even build your own lightweight in-house framework (or no framework at all). It's no longer the case.