Career

Back in 2018 I was asked about whether someone should become a Unix specialist. In a similar vein, I saw a question on LinkedIn that asked whether someone should become a generalist or a front-end specialist or a back-end specialist. Of course I had opinions :-) This is an extended take on my quick reply to the LinkedIn question. Let’s scope this a bit better I think, first, we need to think slightly wider than “front/backend”.

I get email… What are your thoughts about making a career out of specialising in Unix? It seems like you’ve done quite well… Interesting question… Realise that I started doing this 30 years ago. At that time there was no Windows (Windows 1.0 was around the corner). We had DOS. Networking was mostly serial based; if you were (un)lucky you might have had Banyon Vines or Novell or some other proprietary network stack.