Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011)
> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers?  Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs.  In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.In the real world this is (unfortunately) not how technical people are hired. The stack they are using seems to be the first thing hiring managers look at.You would think it would be only clueless recruiters who would think this way, but my experience is that well-respected and successful entrepreneurs also operate along these lines. It is not clear to me whether their success is related to or in spite of this way of thinking. To give them the benefit of the doubt, startups often need to move quickly and those few weeks-months needed for people to become familiar with a new stack they're unfamiliar with may simply not be available.