We might have a different definition of resume driven development. Choosing a company that uses a tech stack you think will be good for your career is fine, though it wouldn’t personally be one of my top criteria. But what I’m advising against is choosing frameworks, architectures, databases, etc. for a specific project, simply because they’re the hot new thing, vs. actually being the best choice for the problem you’re trying to solve, at the company where you’re solving it.
Also, I personally don’t think the specific stacks you’ve had experience with play much of a role in getting top dev jobs. Getting great referals from senior people is generally the best way to get top dev jobs IMO, and you get these referrals by shipping reliable, high quality software consistently, and being pragmatic/mature.
Explain to me how I’m going to get referrals from the people I’m working for? If I ship reliable, high quality software, they have every incentive to keep me.
I mean, old coworkers could potentially be a source of referrals, but not really.
- Person A and person B work together, both are fairly senior
- Person B moves on to a new company. New company is hiring for a senior/lead/staff/director/whatever role. Person B says “we should recruit person A, I’ve worked with them before and they’re great”
- Person A gets recruited for a great position, gets it as long as they do well in the interview
On the flip side, I haven’t seen “experience with specific hot new tech” play much of a role in hiring for senior positions. I’ve conducted around 150 dev interviews, plenty of them for senior+ positions, and we’ve always taken the opinion “let’s just hire a smart, experienced, mature person, who knows what it takes to ship software, and knows how to balance technical priorities with business priorities. Ideally with a glowing referral from someone we trust.” We always assume that someone like this can learn our tech stack fairly quickly. Like at my current workplace we use a lot of Scala, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, K8s and gRPC, but would happily hire someone senior who’s used none of those technologies, but who has used similar enough ones, say Java, any relational db, any key value store, any queue/pub-sub system, VMs and REST.
Also, I personally don’t think the specific stacks you’ve had experience with play much of a role in getting top dev jobs. Getting great referals from senior people is generally the best way to get top dev jobs IMO, and you get these referrals by shipping reliable, high quality software consistently, and being pragmatic/mature.