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Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new langua

Are you a veteran who has experienced this? Because this sounds completely wrong to me. An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. No, the real value is in knowing and understanding the discovered things. And since they are discovered and not invented, they do not change. There's still plenty to learn, but you have more than a lifetime's worth of learning ahead of you even if you steer clear of the shiny baubles that are React/Angular(v[1..n])/Vue/Whatever.

danenania 8y ago
I think a lot of the frustration comes not from the new languages/frameworks themselves, but all the endlessly re-invented support tools that surround them. For example, learning React itself is great because you can pretty quickly see how it cleans up your UI layer. It doesn't take that long and adds real value to your projects. Oh, but now you need to learn all the corner-cases of NPM, and now you need a new test framework, and now you need to figure out the incantations to get webpack x.y.z outputting just the right way. Oops now hot-reloading is broken. And the chrome inspector is lagging for some reason. None of these are interesting or fun problems to solve, but they are a pretty substantial part of getting any new technology into production.
- kentm 8y ago
  Our profession consistently ignores operation and maintenance in favor of building a new thing, despite the former being at least as important. How many people post negatively about Java in terms of productivity and cite boilerplate as a productivity-killer, despite the massive advantages a JVM stack brings?
- timdavila 8y ago
  Yep, this is why I'm much more inclined to go with something I know on the front end. I'm not against learning a new framework, but fighting the tooling is one of the more frustrating things.
jerf 8y ago
I'm an experienced developer and I have no trouble learning things. If anything I'm faster than an inexperienced developer because where they're learning a new concept (e.g., "closures") I'm just learning the local spelling of it and flavor. However, I do get pissy when I have to keep learning things, and never get to exploit them, always having to learn a new thing for every single project. Having started in the web arena since before "backend" and "frontend" were even necessarily separated, I've long since abandoned the frontend. More recently, I've personally been frustrated by the local conditions that have made it so that every system I deploy has required me to learn a new configuration management system. It's not so much an "oh, I'm too tired and old to learn this" but more of a professional eyeroll, "oh, geez, gotta learn some other ephemeral technology to do this job, then gotta learn some other technology that is almost all the same but for the spelling for the next project, etc." But web frontend development really takes the cake, at least in the domains I'm familiar with. I don't mind learning, I even enjoy it. But if you spend all your time learning and never get to exploit, you're operating at a greatly reduced efficiency. At some point you need to stop learning and actually advance some projects.
- kentm 8y ago
  This is well-put. A lot of the issue with "learning new things" is that you're not learning new things, just old things that have been repackaged. Those new things are almost always poorly documented.
bargl 8y ago
I'm not saying it's get's harder to learn a new language vs a first language. It is easier to learn C++ after C. It isn't that it's hard to do. It's that it can be exhausting to do it for the 4th or 5th time, then only get to apply those skills for 2-3 years until you have to. Yes I am a veteran who has experienced this. Design patterns are what I've taken from my experience and applied across languages. But some good patterns in one language can be an Anit-Pattern in another. Not to mention the jump from something like OO to Functional Programming which is not as easy as C -> C++ -> Java -> C#. > An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. That lesson takes a long time to learn, if you are lucky enough to learn it at all.
- yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
  > That lesson takes a long time to learn, if you are lucky enough to learn it at all. I think typically that's true, but it doesn't have to be that way. It reminds me of the idea that there is a difference between having 10 years experience, and experiencing your first year 10 times.

danenania 8y ago

I think a lot of the frustration comes not from the new languages/frameworks themselves, but all the endlessly re-invented support tools that surround them. For example, learning React itself is great because you can pretty quickly see how it cleans up your UI layer. It doesn't take that long and adds real value to your projects. Oh, but now you need to learn all the corner-cases of NPM, and now you need a new test framework, and now you need to figure out the incantations to get webpack x.y.z outputting just the right way. Oops now hot-reloading is broken. And the chrome inspector is lagging for some reason. None of these are interesting or fun problems to solve, but they are a pretty substantial part of getting any new technology into production.

kentm 8y ago
Our profession consistently ignores operation and maintenance in favor of building a new thing, despite the former being at least as important. How many people post negatively about Java in terms of productivity and cite boilerplate as a productivity-killer, despite the massive advantages a JVM stack brings?
timdavila 8y ago
Yep, this is why I'm much more inclined to go with something I know on the front end. I'm not against learning a new framework, but fighting the tooling is one of the more frustrating things.

jerf 8y ago

I'm an experienced developer and I have no trouble learning things. If anything I'm faster than an inexperienced developer because where they're learning a new concept (e.g., "closures") I'm just learning the local spelling of it and flavor. However, I do get pissy when I have to keep learning things, and never get to exploit them, always having to learn a new thing for every single project. Having started in the web arena since before "backend" and "frontend" were even necessarily separated, I've long since abandoned the frontend. More recently, I've personally been frustrated by the local conditions that have made it so that every system I deploy has required me to learn a new configuration management system. It's not so much an "oh, I'm too tired and old to learn this" but more of a professional eyeroll, "oh, geez, gotta learn some other ephemeral technology to do this job, then gotta learn some other technology that is almost all the same but for the spelling for the next project, etc." But web frontend development really takes the cake, at least in the domains I'm familiar with. I don't mind learning, I even enjoy it. But if you spend all your time learning and never get to exploit, you're operating at a greatly reduced efficiency. At some point you need to stop learning and actually advance some projects.

kentm 8y ago
This is well-put. A lot of the issue with "learning new things" is that you're not learning new things, just old things that have been repackaged. Those new things are almost always poorly documented.

bargl 8y ago

I'm not saying it's get's harder to learn a new language vs a first language. It is easier to learn C++ after C. It isn't that it's hard to do. It's that it can be exhausting to do it for the 4th or 5th time, then only get to apply those skills for 2-3 years until you have to. Yes I am a veteran who has experienced this. Design patterns are what I've taken from my experience and applied across languages. But some good patterns in one language can be an Anit-Pattern in another. Not to mention the jump from something like OO to Functional Programming which is not as easy as C -> C++ -> Java -> C#. > An experienced developer typically has no problem picking up new languages/frameworks/tools/etc. There isn't much value in familiarising oneself with arbitrary and invented things, of which there are many in our industry, and they are ephemeral. That lesson takes a long time to learn, if you are lucky enough to learn it at all.

yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
> That lesson takes a long time to learn, if you are lucky enough to learn it at all. I think typically that's true, but it doesn't have to be that way. It reminds me of the idea that there is a difference between having 10 years experience, and experiencing your first year 10 times.