Throwaway for job reasons.<p>I am an experienced backend developer, who has been doing mixed freelance and full-time agency work on the backend (writing APIs, managing servers, log analysis, DB management, etc)<p>I have a variety of experience: I am very good at python, good at nodeJS, and workable in rails. I use Heroku, gitflow &amp; write solid documentation.<p>However, in doing job applications I feel...unprepared. Companies seem to ask for me to be incredibly diverse AND specialized: e.g. be a wizard at Chef, know how to manage bare metal and cloud, write in C and RoR, etc etc.<p>I do not feel qualified in those things, but I do experientially _inclined_ to be, i.e. I am familiar enough that I could learn them or are already quite familiar, but am not &quot;there&quot; yet.<p>Does this mean:
a) I am not qualified for this job and should find another
b) I am not qualified for this job but should interview anyway, to see how far behind I really am (or how top heavy their job description is)
c) I am qualified for this job, and all jobs assume you don&#x27;t know everything they want you to
d) hit the shed, learn everything
Ask HN: Diverse but unspecialized back end dev; how do I specialize?