IMHO, I just don't buy this. Every piece of technology has its own set of quirks, pitfalls, and shortcuts. You can jump around from Rails to Spring to iOS to whatever and be a decent individual contributor. But to be a real Senior/Lead engineer that can be responsible for a project you've gotta have the in depth knowledge.
- If you become senior manager of an existing project, learn from the rest of the team!
- If you end senior manager of a new project, you probably shouldn't also be new at the company period, but at the very least, you start with something there is expertise somewhere on the team on.
- New tech, new team, new org all at once: that's a terrible idea. The project shouldn't happen, or you shouldn't be the sole senior manager on it.
All that said, if we have some team continuity across the industry, that should allow enough on boarding time for everyone to a be a non-pidgeonholed generalist. Just because there are derivative bounds doesn't mean we can't abandon change and pigeon-hole people in myopic specialist roles.
Sure, but the time it takes to hit diminishing returns wrt different technologies seems greatly underrated to me. I've seen many engineers stick with a single technology so long that they were just memorizing standard libraries instead of actually learning anything.
