Interesting way to search for jobs. I feel a bit weird though in that I'm drawn to jobs more based on the business domain and problems being solved than the particular technology used for the implementation. Getting asked 'what is your stack' always felt like a weird lead in vs. what problems you are solving day to day, but I feel mostly alone in this sentiment...
There is no reason to feel alone, perhaps rare, but not alone. There are others that share your feelings (including myself).
These people are often labelled as the "pragmatic". They also lean towards having a more general scope of knowledge and thus often lack a "speciality".
There are also those that simply wish to solve the problem in the "best" way possible, and will use whichever stack gets them closer to that ideal solution.
disclaimer: purely based on my experience/opinion/perspective.
I think it has merit for devs looking to get involved in a particular tech (whatever their reasons may be).
In the past I work almost exclusively within the .NET ecosystem (only some small projects in Java, Python, etc.). When I took up learning Scala, I decided that I want to immerse myself in full-time Scala development and started to look for Scala-related roles.
I can absolutely understand and I feel the same way. I can't understand this infatuation with stacks. They're just a tool for solving a problem. If another tool is better for solving a particular problem then you should use that. It's nothing to be obsessed with.
If you present yourself as just a bunch of TLAs you're effectively selling yourself short. Put bluntly, if you do that you're presenting yourself as a code monkey who turns other people's ideas and solutions into that nasty computer code the people who do the "real thinking" can't be bothered to deal with.
Besides, your favourite stack today might fall out of favour tomorrow. If you invested a disproportionate amount of time into learning all the intricacies of that particular stack you might have wasted a lot of time.
Being able to analyze and solve problems regardless of the toolset is a skill that likely will never fall out of favour.
But the job ads and interviews I've seen and been to are all heavily about the stack and very little about other qualities. E.g. changing language is considered making me junior from senior and halving my salary. Only exception would be a newer tech e.g. GO where perhaps getting experienced people is tough.
> as long as I don't have to work with something terribly archaic
Totally! I definitely wouldn't want to work in something like, say, Pascal, but my all time favorite job was at a startup using Java, of all languages.
