Niching up

Published on 2026-04-19 19:32

This post is about niching down too much and my plans to reverse it. Basically I effed up and now I digging myself out of the hole.

Resisting niching down

Since my teenage years, adults have told me to specialise. First person who told me to specialise was a psychologist at a centre where kids got diagnosed with conditions like dyslexia. That was at the age of 14 or 15. At that time my first reaction to that was resistance.

My university years and the study programme was opposite of niching down. I chose the programme as its description promised to drag the students from circuit design to web development. And it delivered on that promise. I also landed on the web because I liked it the most.

JavaScript frameworks

During the mid 2010s when JavaScript frameworks entered the frontend development in full force, I still was doing my best to resist niching down. It did work for me until 2020 when I found myself in a niche of "she's capable of working with Angular". That was the first time niching down, even if accidental, has hurt me.

Whale on the beach moment

Last spring I've had a beached whale moment because for almost three previous years I've been working on a design system and so far it has been my favourite project of my career. It was in my favourite niche, design systems. Unfortunately, at the worst possible moment I was replaced with an internal person.

At that moment my manager and I started looking for my next position. I can speak for myself when I tried to look for a similar position and found more or less nothing. There was one position that would fit my stack in western Spain but they were hiring a junior developer.

What's next?

That's a good question. Currently I'm working as Frontend leaning developer. So I'm having an overlap to backend coding which seems to be my second favourite type of work, working Full stack. But I'm thinking about freelancing on the side to explore things that I don't get to do much at my Brotberuf, like data visualisations and creative coding, possibly even making websites again.

One thing that I'm sure of is that it'll take me while before I commit again to a certain niche because when it works, it's great. When it stops working, it's a whale on the beach. Like the real whale it's hard to get back to the water.