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Why Developers Stagnate
If you are standing still, you are falling behind
You have to evolve. Stagnation breeds boredom. Matt Bellamy
Developers' careers can stagnate when they get stuck in a role where they learn no new skills. Whilst developers skills fail to evolve, the technological environment moves on.
Developers sticking to what they know and staying in their comfort zone will lead to developer fatigue and boredom.
Developers cannot expect business or projects to develop their skills and knowledge. Developers must take the responsibility for learning and avoiding stagnation because its for the benefit of their career. Learning new skills and progressing their career is often not in the interest in the companies they work for because it involves a period where they are not good at their job (whilst they learn).
Career progression is risky for companies because the developer might suffer from the Peter Principle and reach the level of their incompetence.
Evolving
Many articles are written on IT evolving, and developers need to adapt.
What does this really mean, what actions should developer or development teams take to cope?
To evolve as a developer, you need to combine different approaches, technologies, best practices and create something new.
Animals evolve by two animals, getting it on and mixing their genes together. Sometimes the genes mutate and create a different feature.
We don’t know what will be better, so after creation, it’s trial and error. Evolution decides if the change makes the animal more effective, it will thrive and the change will spread. Changes that are less effective will die out.
As developers, we evolve our skills by trying new things, learning new skills and seeing what works. This will lead to some best practices that will work in some scenarios but not all.
There is no best practice, there are good practices that are a good choice for some scenarios and not good for others.
