Assumed audience: Despite the programming languages in the opening, this applies outside tech and across industries. It is about careers, not about computers.
Many years ago, when I was working at Olo, a colleague asked me, “Why are you interested in Rust? It’s not like we’re going to use that here!” Olo was and is a .NET shop, and my enthusiasm for Rust seemed odd to a lot of my colleagues at Olo, especially in the
I don’t actually recall what I said to that colleague all those years ago, but obviously the question itself made an impression: I still think of it from time to time. Here’s how I would answer it now, in two parts, the less important part first:
First, this is not my last technology. I have been in this industry some 15 years, and over that time I have already seen technologies go from “extremely hot” to “fairly staid” — not that Java or Ruby is going anywhere, but do I expect most of the interesting jobs another 20 years from now to be using either? Probably not, honestly. I started my career working with Fortran and C and PHP, and while none of those three are going anywhere, and indeed while there will be good pay in working on code written in them for a long time, they are not (I think and hope!) the future of software development.
What is more, I have learned about myself over the years that I like being a relatively early adopter of good new technology and — where possible — helping it go mainstream. Not bleeding-edge early, not nothing-works-until-you-implement-it-yourself early. More like Rust 1.0 early: late enough that there are a lot of things that work, but early enough that I can contribute meaningfully in some way, often by communicating effectively about it. (Thus: my recent work helping a bit here and there with telling the world about Jujutsu.)
JavaScript — and then TypeScript — have been my first language from a pays-the-bills point-of-view since 2014 or so. I have written tiny bits of C♯ at Olo and Java at LinkedIn, and have managed to work directly on Rust projects here and there. But I do not expect TypeScript to be the primary language I use for the rest of my career!
So, again: this — whether that this is JavaScript/TypeScript or C♯ or whatever else — is not my last technology.
Second, though, and by far the more important: this is not my last job — wherever I am working at any given moment, right up through retirement. I mean that in two ways. First of all: I expect to have several more employers between today and the end of my career. When I had that conversation back at Olo, I was not yet actively looking anywhere else, but I fully expected I would move on at some point. Likewise, I did not begin planning to leave LinkedIn until mid-to-late 2023 (not many months before I did in fact leave).
I would love to find the kind of place I can stay for the rest of my career, but to date nowhere has come close. (I hoped LinkedIn would be a
There is another way, though, in which this is not my last job, whomever my employer may be. I am not the kind of person who can just hit his stride at 35 and settle in to do that for the rest of his life with little change. (Sometimes I am tempted to envy people who can do that.) I am always looking for new ways to stretch and grow. So even if I find that very special employer where I can continue to grow in mutually beneficial ways for the rest of my career, my role there will undoubtedly change over time.
Put more directly: Someday I will find my last employer — but I fully expect I will have several jobs with that employer in terms of the work I do.
So why did I want to learn Rust back then? Why did I spend a decent chunk of late 2023 and early 2024 learning a bit about how to build programming languages? Why do I keep studying how other fields interact with or inform this one? Well, for many reasons, including the sheer love of learning — but also, in part, because this is not my last job.
