I admire your optimism. Perhaps I have been in the industry for too long, but these days I much prefer being a specialist in a particular niche as opposed to be known as the guy in the office who gets emailed when the printer breaks, a server goes down, a Wordpress site needs to be built or someone has a question about why their email is broken.
I have been in that situation a few times in my career, when I worked at a digital agency especially. My job varied from Javascript, CSS and HTML, to developing HTML newsletters, building Wordpress websites, setting up servers/databases and tonnes of other things. At the time it was an invaluable learning experience, but also meant I worked long hours because my list of responsibilities was longer, friendships suffered because I worked a lot of weekends/late nights. As a result of that job, I didn't feel like it made me an expert in one particular thing. I was good at many things, but not truly great at front or back-end development. I felt like I had to learn outside of work hours to get good enough to specialise in my chosen field (my day-to-day job was obviously also a factor).
If I went for a job advertised as one thing, but then discovered that they expect you to be good at a lot of other things it would make me think twice (at least now I do). When I first started out, I was willing to do anything because I was young, naive and excited I had a job doing what I wanted to do in life.
My initial thoughts would be, "Please, not again. I don't want the responsibility of wearing multiple hats. I've worked hard to get to the point where I want to specialise in a chosen field", followed by, "This company is trying to get a combination stir-fry developer so they can cheap out and not have to hire a separate database administrator or back-end developer."
If you want a developer who knows a lot of things and is expected to work with a tonne of different languages, deploy a server and make coffee: there is nothing wrong with that, just be upfront and honest about it, so people like myself don't waste your time and have their time wasted. Don't lure candidates in with a misleading job description only for them to discover the job is actually more than you initially led on.
Thanks for the great response! You're right, I would definitely be suspicious of people marketing one thing and delivering another, so to speak. I haven't had the experience of getting a software development job and finding myself fixing printers, so perhaps that's a danger I should learn from your kindly shared experience to be more wary of. I suppose our experiences and frustrations have simply developed differently!
I have been in that situation a few times in my career, when I worked at a digital agency especially. My job varied from Javascript, CSS and HTML, to developing HTML newsletters, building Wordpress websites, setting up servers/databases and tonnes of other things. At the time it was an invaluable learning experience, but also meant I worked long hours because my list of responsibilities was longer, friendships suffered because I worked a lot of weekends/late nights. As a result of that job, I didn't feel like it made me an expert in one particular thing. I was good at many things, but not truly great at front or back-end development. I felt like I had to learn outside of work hours to get good enough to specialise in my chosen field (my day-to-day job was obviously also a factor).
If I went for a job advertised as one thing, but then discovered that they expect you to be good at a lot of other things it would make me think twice (at least now I do). When I first started out, I was willing to do anything because I was young, naive and excited I had a job doing what I wanted to do in life.
My initial thoughts would be, "Please, not again. I don't want the responsibility of wearing multiple hats. I've worked hard to get to the point where I want to specialise in a chosen field", followed by, "This company is trying to get a combination stir-fry developer so they can cheap out and not have to hire a separate database administrator or back-end developer."
If you want a developer who knows a lot of things and is expected to work with a tonne of different languages, deploy a server and make coffee: there is nothing wrong with that, just be upfront and honest about it, so people like myself don't waste your time and have their time wasted. Don't lure candidates in with a misleading job description only for them to discover the job is actually more than you initially led on.