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Some junior developers I have worked with are grossly incompetent even with a CS degree from well respected schools because they treat their education as a trad

Some junior developers I have worked with are grossly incompetent even with a CS degree from well respected schools because they treat their education as a trade school, ignore the standards that govern their profession/technology, and are utterly reliant on unnecessary abstractions to write any code at all. The negligence is so common it has names like imposter syndrome. I wonder if an educational program like this is far superior. I would be curious to hear about the results. If you are teaching JavaScript and client-side skill I recommend teaching the standard DOM methods and how to efficiently “walk the DOM”. It is becoming a lost art, but there is no alternative. The DOM methods remain the only true standard to access markup as everything else is an abstraction that compiles down to that at an incredible performance cost. It’s little things like that that add up over time that crush an application and complicate what are otherwise quick and simple architectural decisions. I am biased because that kind of standards based approach has made me more employable.

computerex 8y ago
> If you are teaching JavaScript and client-side skill I recommend teaching the standard DOM methods and how to efficiently “walk the DOM”. It is becoming a lost art, but there is no alternative. The DOM methods remain the only true standard to access markup as everything else is an abstraction that compiles down to that at an incredible performance cost. Please forgive me, but this reads like a satire post from /r/programmingcirclejerk Any sane program aiming to get candidates ready for real world jobs would teach their students modern front-end frameworks like React/Vue/Angular/Ember These frameworks typically come with a virtual dom and they optimize state mutations onto the real DOM better than any human can. > The negligence is so common it has names like imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is a real thing supported by real research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome#References This is also real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
bcherny 8y ago
You mean, you don’t use frameworks at all?
- austincheney 8y ago
  A framework isn't a valid excuse for a deficit of necessary valuable skills. With additional confidence and capabilities comes the potential to solve complex problems with fast simple solutions a given framework may not expose.
filesystem 8y ago
I'm confused on who or what misled you to believe that imposter syndrome only exists within the CS bubble. It's a human phenomenon. Sometimes it is purposefully fueled by junior developers being talked down to be senior developers who at best feel threatened of being exposed (do I really deserve to make double what a junior dev makes?) or at worst are simply misanthropic. Many of these senior developers are surely skilled at walking the DOM but due to their toxic attitude must be managed with kid gloves like so: https://hbr.org/2016/10/how-to-manage-a-toxic-employee https://hbr.org/2016/10/how-to-manage-a-toxic-employee
- austincheney 8y ago
  > I'm confused on who or what misled you to believe that imposter syndrome only exists within the CS bubble. There is a big difference between lacking confidence and feeling like an imposter versus a fraudulent qualification. This is solved in most industries through licensing/certification. If you want to practice medicine, law, or nearly anything else you need a license. You need a license to be a truck driver. With such licensing comes testing, a validation of experience, background checks of your professional employment. Software has none of this. That being said how do you identify if a potential software applicant is a fraud to the skills they claim to possess? You really don't. You interview them and hope to separate the capable from the incapable, but often it isn't clear until after they are hired and spent some time on the job. The second order consequence is when you hire only weak developers that weakness is the new (lower) baseline of acceptable competence. > Many of these senior developers are surely skilled at walking the DOM but due to their toxic attitude I think that is a gross generalization to suggest that somebody has enviable valuable skills they are therefore toxic. They could be, in fact, abrasive. It could also be that the people without the valuable skills are defensive and insecure. The best way to answer this is if everybody in that scenario had the valuable skills would the toxic nature still be present? In my experience toxic people remain toxic even when the environment changes.

computerex 8y ago

> If you are teaching JavaScript and client-side skill I recommend teaching the standard DOM methods and how to efficiently “walk the DOM”. It is becoming a lost art, but there is no alternative. The DOM methods remain the only true standard to access markup as everything else is an abstraction that compiles down to that at an incredible performance cost. Please forgive me, but this reads like a satire post from /r/programmingcirclejerk Any sane program aiming to get candidates ready for real world jobs would teach their students modern front-end frameworks like React/Vue/Angular/Ember These frameworks typically come with a virtual dom and they optimize state mutations onto the real DOM better than any human can. > The negligence is so common it has names like imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is a real thing supported by real research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome#References This is also real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

bcherny 8y ago

You mean, you don’t use frameworks at all?

austincheney 8y ago
A framework isn't a valid excuse for a deficit of necessary valuable skills. With additional confidence and capabilities comes the potential to solve complex problems with fast simple solutions a given framework may not expose.

filesystem 8y ago

I'm confused on who or what misled you to believe that imposter syndrome only exists within the CS bubble. It's a human phenomenon. Sometimes it is purposefully fueled by junior developers being talked down to be senior developers who at best feel threatened of being exposed (do I really deserve to make double what a junior dev makes?) or at worst are simply misanthropic. Many of these senior developers are surely skilled at walking the DOM but due to their toxic attitude must be managed with kid gloves like so: https://hbr.org/2016/10/how-to-manage-a-toxic-employee https://hbr.org/2016/10/how-to-manage-a-toxic-employee

austincheney 8y ago
> I'm confused on who or what misled you to believe that imposter syndrome only exists within the CS bubble. There is a big difference between lacking confidence and feeling like an imposter versus a fraudulent qualification. This is solved in most industries through licensing/certification. If you want to practice medicine, law, or nearly anything else you need a license. You need a license to be a truck driver. With such licensing comes testing, a validation of experience, background checks of your professional employment. Software has none of this. That being said how do you identify if a potential software applicant is a fraud to the skills they claim to possess? You really don't. You interview them and hope to separate the capable from the incapable, but often it isn't clear until after they are hired and spent some time on the job. The second order consequence is when you hire only weak developers that weakness is the new (lower) baseline of acceptable competence. > Many of these senior developers are surely skilled at walking the DOM but due to their toxic attitude I think that is a gross generalization to suggest that somebody has enviable valuable skills they are therefore toxic. They could be, in fact, abrasive. It could also be that the people without the valuable skills are defensive and insecure. The best way to answer this is if everybody in that scenario had the valuable skills would the toxic nature still be present? In my experience toxic people remain toxic even when the environment changes.