This is also part of the reason you find reliable reseller partners. They can burn cycles figuring out what new tech is useful and what is a waste of time so you can spend your cycles actually getting things done with cool new tech that works without wasting your company's time and money on things that have fatal flaws that aren't immediately obvious.

One reason why people hire me, is for my actual, production, experience in loads of stacks and architectures.

Actual, production experience, is, IMO, a requirement to make decisions. No-one will make a good decision to ditch or embrace, say, microservices, based on a HN conversation and a few blog-posts. Nor will they make such a decision based on papers in science journals.

But rather based on failures with monoliths, failures with microservices, successes in Rails, successes in Drupal, and failures in Rails or Drupal. (Or leptos, React, flask, whatnots). Actual felt pain, and drawn learnings. Actual celebrated successes and drawn learnings.

edit: I'll often bring that up in consultancy. "Yes, Rails is great because X and Y. But Z is a rather real danger for your case; we've been bitten by that when building FooBarLy..."

What I'm trying to say: yes, indeed, this person is also collecting experience and evidence to make future decisions on. That there's a real need, and actual benefit on trying and implementing new tech. If only because otherwise we'd still be maintaining COBOL mainframe spagetti (oh. wait...)

Be honest with me, how many jobs have you had that cared about your variety of experiences?

I’ve been applying to jobs for months and they’re all looking for go and python devs.

I have production experience with both languages, their common web stacks, and many others (ruby, js, php, c#, elixir, erlang, rust).

I’ve felt that even mentioning that I have experience with other stacks is a turn off to recruiters and EMs.

Nobody seems to care about breadth of experience nowadays.

All of them in the last decade.

But I guess we misunderstand each-other. None of them cared that I knew "a lot of stuff that isn't appropriate here".

For example, a recent gig, hired me because I'm not just another Rails "expert", but a Rails expert with Typescript experience, who built large CI/CD pipelines with containers and has built complex (is there another way?) AWS infrastructures etc.

Sometimes they need someone with that exact skill-set. In this case, they needed someone to help them move from yet another "upwork-delivered-rails-spagetti" to something that could actually be maintained.

I convinced them to drop the react/typescript frontend for now (it was terribly bolted on) and to forego building their own PaaS nightmare on AWS but instead just push to Heroku - for now.

My experience helped them make tough decisions.

Sometimes gigs hire me because I have a weird combination of experiences. But more often because my experience allows me to help them make decisions on architecture and such. Granted, I am often hired as "senior architect" or some such. And one of the first things I do, is convince them they should never again hire an "externalm interim architect", lol.

I envy that position.

Feels like because I didn’t work in go or python at my most recent job, I’m having trouble landing anything. (I have 5 years of golang prior to my most recent job)

My experience working in devops doesn’t seem to matter for SE positions either.

I do freelance gigs. And I charge what's "enough" for me, so price may play a role. And so I have several gigs a year. I'm on my third for 2024.

I give talks on meetups and conferences, so my insights are seen.

I prefer to work in start- or scale ups, so there's a real need for some "know it all".

How did you get started doing that?

It might just be the area I live in, but I wouldn’t even know how to start looking for freelance roles that aren’t just poorly paid 3mo junior contracts.