
Ask HN: How has learning a new language helped you in your career? - jimbob45
Looking for those who have learned a new language after they were already employed.
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EnderMB
Confidence, mostly.

I started out as a .NET developer, and I worked my way up from junior to
senior over the space of a few years. At my last .NET role, I helped shape the
structure of .NET development for my satellite office and the growing London
team.

Despite being considered a decent enough .NET developer, I had felt a bit of
imposter syndrome around my skills. In the wider tech community, .NET and C#
has always been a pariah, and while looking at who was hiring in my local
area, I decided to apply for a role that didn't involve any .NET.

Now, I write Ruby, and while there was a learning curve to start with, I can
firmly say that I am capable of adapting to a new stack. I like Ruby, and I
still like .NET, but I feel so much more confident about learning new things
now that I've proved that I can do it.

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ooooak
> How has learning a new language helped you in your career?

I have a success story, I would not say it helped me in my career. but it made
me more confident as a developer.

I was a full-stack PHP developer. In my free time, I always learn new
languages (python, ruby, go, rust, OCaml, Clojure, and some Haskell). even now
I kinda enjoy learning new stacks. its just fun for me.

For one of our projects (it's back 3 or 4 years ago), we used node. To that
point, I never really looked deep into it as I was always busy with go and
rust. turns out I was really productive from day one. while others had to do
some soul searching.

In short, it made me a better developer and more confident.

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2rsf
I choose the best tool for the job and not necessarily the tool I know, this
includes languages but also environments and technologies. I needed Perl (yes,
I know), Python, C++, Java, JS, and a few other obscure scripting languages
simply because of an existing tool or due to better performance so I simply
learnt them.

If you are referring to spoken language, then I learnt Swedish to better
communicate with my work colleagues.

