"There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time."
-- That's not true at all. It takes a lot more time to learn a platform well, and know how to tackle mobile client side problems especially coming from the server side.
Nobody will let you close to their production code without some bit of experience as you are more likely to fuck up things. It is very easy to introduce bugs on a client, and there are no unit tests to help you out on tricky things such as deadlocks.
Also the fact that you are not learning on your own means that you are not passionate enough for the space. Most good mobile devs I know have created some silly app at some point, just to kick the tires.
You might not have a full blown commercial app developed, but you should have some significant demo on your hand to show.
I don't like the argument that if you don't practice this particular piece at home, then you're not a passionate developer for some particular platform.
Good devs are good devs, and it's difficult to parse time out to learn each individual platform.
The good devs I know can learn stuff really quickly and the ability to engineer things well is fairly platform independent.
If we were talking about different layers (like say a Systems Developer trying to do UI work) that's a completely different story.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Good development practices already encompass all of these issues and a great developer can skill up for a new language in a few weeks.
The issue is that there is a lack of great developers in the world, not that mobile development is especially hard or requires any kind of unique skill-set.
Comments
"There are plenty of good developers who could easily immerse themselves in mobile app development for two weeks, and become pretty skilled mobile devs in little time."
-- That's not true at all. It takes a lot more time to learn a platform well, and know how to tackle mobile client side problems especially coming from the server side. Nobody will let you close to their production code without some bit of experience as you are more likely to fuck up things. It is very easy to introduce bugs on a client, and there are no unit tests to help you out on tricky things such as deadlocks.
Also the fact that you are not learning on your own means that you are not passionate enough for the space. Most good mobile devs I know have created some silly app at some point, just to kick the tires.
You might not have a full blown commercial app developed, but you should have some significant demo on your hand to show.
I don't like the argument that if you don't practice this particular piece at home, then you're not a passionate developer for some particular platform.
Good devs are good devs, and it's difficult to parse time out to learn each individual platform.
The good devs I know can learn stuff really quickly and the ability to engineer things well is fairly platform independent.
If we were talking about different layers (like say a Systems Developer trying to do UI work) that's a completely different story.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Good development practices already encompass all of these issues and a great developer can skill up for a new language in a few weeks.
The issue is that there is a lack of great developers in the world, not that mobile development is especially hard or requires any kind of unique skill-set.