Rulian Estivalletti
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

I just want to add as someone who has interviewed many developers for hire, there is no bigger red flag for me than when someone starts promoting a particular stack. Its also why I don’t believe in asking a bunch of technical questions or programming puzzles to “get them”.

Focus on being a good listener, good team mate, and a decent learner and you’ll be more useful than a JS or Rails guru who can’t take orders. I’ve seen people try to push rails on a company just because they liked it more, to devastating consequences.

Learning to code is not the only thing you need to become a developer. As I’ve explained to several people, we don’t need people to write code, we need people who we can trust to figure out what code to write.

My advice to new developers is simple — build things that take you deeper up and down the stack.

Make a twitter clone, reddit clone, make your own framework, build useless things that do nothing more than force you to make decisions and understand tradeoffs. The ecosystems around you will start to make more sense, and the technology that powers them will start to become irrelevant.

Get comfortable making decisions for practical reasons and you’ll be on your way to being more useful to your entire organizations.

Ohh, and just to save you some trouble — possessing the ability to make full products, and knowing what products to build, are very different skill and mindsets. Give value to all the levels of a business you find yourself in. And if you do get the entrepreneurial spirit, be ready to come off the developer’s high horse, there is no more humbling experience than trying to sell something you’ve built.

    Rulian Estivalletti

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    Currently working on aboutmomentum.com. Have a lot of of opinions on dating, love and relationships, and not all of them are good.