The Great Single Skill Myth

Whilst reading the feedback to my last, apparently controversial, blog post about learning a new language to improve you own skillset I noticed something about the way we, as developers, sell ourselves and describe ourselves to one another. Every developer I know, even myself is guilty of it, and there is almost an entire industry revolving around this same concept.

So, what is this? In essence, this is our need as developers to label ourselves with a particular technological expertise - for instance, you may be a PHP developer, you may be a .NET developer, you may be a Java developer - which is fine, but very few of us will just describe ourselves as just a developer, or even web developer in preference.


As I have said before on this blog, technologies themselves (in the form of languages etc) are tools - they help us achieve an end game which is the delivery of a product to an end user, be it a web application, desktop application, or even the innards of an internet enabled doorstop. We as developers simply use these tools. We do not swear any form of allegiance to them, and we definitely do not use them in exclusion to others so why do we so often feel the need to label ourselves with them.

For instance, here is a list of all the various development tools I use day to day:

ColdFusion
Ruby on Rails
Javascript
ActionScript 3
SQL
CSS
HTML
jQuery
Flex
MXML
XAML
Silverlight

However, if I were to describe what I am trying to achieve with these tools it’s much simpler:

Develop and deliver web applications for my customers

So, why would I feel the need, as so many do, to label myself as a CF or Rails developer (or indeed any of the 12 or more items in the list above).

Lets, for example, take a look at a very close relation to us developers, the designer. Now, a designer would never ever describe themselves in terms of the tooling they use, i.e. as a ‘Photoshop designer’ or an ‘illustrator designer’ - but by the end game they are trying to aim at, a ‘web designer’ or ‘packaging designer’ - so why do we do it? Why do we feel this need

The only area of my activities where I would expect to be describing people in the way we actually do is that of the dark dingy world of recruitment, where I am specifically looking for a particular skill set - I specifically need some Flex skills, or a Javascript guru. However, if I were marketing myself to a recruiter in order to get a new job, surely I would want to keep it as broad as possible to maximise my potential opportunities.

Well, here is where I declare that I do not have the answer, but I am interested in any ideas anyone might have as to why we do it. Why do we have a preference to label ourselves with some sort of technological allegiance rather that simply saying ‘Web Applications developer’?.