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Discuss this Chapter!
Context: You are seeking a role in a team where you can Chapter 17, Be The Worst
Problem: Unfortunately that team has no incentive to risk hiring someone who will only be able to Chapter 21, Sweep The Floor. The team also faces the possibility that you may not even be able to do that.
Solution: Acquire and maintain concrete skills. Even though one of the things that an apprentice brings to a team is an ability to learn quickly, the possession of discrete and demonstrable ability with specific tools and technologies increases the likelihood that you can be trusted to Chapter 21, Sweep The Floor until you start to gain stature.
Some of the concrete skills you will acquire will be little more than mechanisms to get you past crude HR filters and managers who construct teams by playing buzzword bingo. Others will reassure your prospective team members that you can be put to good use and will not require Day Care (reference "Organizational Patterns of Software Development", page 88). Examples of concrete skills include writing build files in various popular languages, knowledge of various popular open source frameworks like Hibernate and Struts, Javascript, and the standard libraries in your language of choice.
The point is that you will often require hiring managers to take a leap of faith in choosing you. Concrete skills (which are ideally discrete enough that you can bring toy implementations to an interview) provide a way to meet them halfway. They are your answer to the question: "If we hire you today what can you do on Monday morning that will benefit us?"
As you begin to make the transition to the role of Journeyman you will become less dependent on these skills as you start to be hired on the basis of your reputation, your portfolio of previous work, and the deeper qualities you bring to a team. Until then your virtues must be a little more overt.
