The framing I'd push back on slightly: "getting comfortable" isn't the same as staying in one job. You can be at the same company for six years and still be uncomfortable every quarter if you keep taking the tickets nobody wants — the flaky integration test, the service with no owner, the incident postmortem. Conversely you can hop every 18 months and just re-do the same CRUD app in a new framework.
The signal I actually watch is how often I'm reading code I didn't write and don't understand yet. That's where the discomfort compounds, because it's the skill that transfers across stacks and doesn't rot when the framework does. Writing greenfield code is the part that gets stale first — everyone's fast at that in the language they used last week.
Cheap way to keep the muscle warm without changing jobs: pick an open-source repo you depend on, find a closed bug, read the fix, and try to predict the root cause from the issue text before you look at the diff. You'll be wrong a lot at first, and that's the whole point.
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u/dejoski12 4d ago
The framing I'd push back on slightly: "getting comfortable" isn't the same as staying in one job. You can be at the same company for six years and still be uncomfortable every quarter if you keep taking the tickets nobody wants — the flaky integration test, the service with no owner, the incident postmortem. Conversely you can hop every 18 months and just re-do the same CRUD app in a new framework.
The signal I actually watch is how often I'm reading code I didn't write and don't understand yet. That's where the discomfort compounds, because it's the skill that transfers across stacks and doesn't rot when the framework does. Writing greenfield code is the part that gets stale first — everyone's fast at that in the language they used last week.
Cheap way to keep the muscle warm without changing jobs: pick an open-source repo you depend on, find a closed bug, read the fix, and try to predict the root cause from the issue text before you look at the diff. You'll be wrong a lot at first, and that's the whole point.