How Many Languages And Frameworks Should You Know To Get A Job At Big Tech ?

If anyone is starting with their interview preparation, the usual first step is to check for courses online on platforms like Youtube. As soon as you search for courses, you will come across 10s of programming languages and frameworks that instructors are teaching. You will find it utterly overwhelming to figure out what to learn and what to leave. The time is limited so it is humanly impossible to learn everything and be an expert. Either you could have shallow knowledge of lots of technologies or have deep knowledge of few of them. So the question arises, how many languages & frameworks one should know so as to get a high paying job at a good tech company ?

It is important to understand what all is asked when you interview for good tech companies. These companies have 100s of teams. Each team works on different set of technologies. For example, at Google, most of the work is done in 4 programming languages: C++, Java, Python & Go. These are just programming languages, then comes frameworks for web development, mobile app development, pubsub, databases and many more. It is not possible for even the smartest of candidate to know about all of them. So these companies never focus on a particular programming language or framework.

What they want is that the candidate should be smart enough to self learn a technology in a few weeks of time and get started coding with coding in it.

Now you know that the company's goal is not any technology but the foundational skills that make a candidate smart. So you need not learn any particular tech stack or a programming language to ace the interviews. As long as you know the concepts behind them, you are good to go. So you should focus on learning any one programming language and be super good at it. You should be able to code anything in that programming language.

The interviewers at good tech companies will give you freedom to choose a language of your choice and solve the problem using that.

Regarding frameworks, there is a lot of confusion like whether you should learn MERN stack or Django and so on. Good tech companies will never ask you questions related to a particular framework. Instead you should know the foundational concepts like how servers communicate with each other, how databases work, how to write secure programs, how multithreading works and so on.

As long as you know the basic concepts in detail, you need not know the syntax of any particular programming language or a tech stack.