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Yes it's insane. The javascript world in particular suffered greatly from people carving up a name and conferences for themselves by building frankly ridiculous

Yes it's insane. The javascript world in particular suffered greatly from people carving up a name and conferences for themselves by building frankly ridiculous tools that the vast majority of people don't even need to reach for. But FOMO takes over. Then you have the extremely low barrier of entry, resulting in `is-odd` packages polluting the shit out of the ecosystem. Then you have everyone and their mother becoming a "JS coder" and bombarding twitter with dev.to articles. You end up in JS hell. The solution is to eject and avoid javascript as much as you can. At this point it's already too late to reverse course, or worse the majority don't even want to reverse course. I've know many people, including my younger brother who said "fuck this" and went full backend to avoid working with npm/node/js.

the_only_law 5y ago
> The javascript world in particular suffered greatly from people carving up a name and conferences for themselves by building frankly ridiculous tools that the vast majority of people don't even need to reach for. But FOMO takes over. Then you realize your resume is getting screened out at half the jobs look look at because you "missed out". FWIW it happens on the backend too, see docker, k8s, and all the related container infra I “missed out on”
davzie 5y ago
This is without joke what I'm actually thinking about doing. I just can't get on with Javascript, and that's with 4 / 5 years of Vue development. I hate that I can't just come back to a project 6 months later and build it. Something always breaks. Everything feels super fragile. So I might just learn Go and stick to backend only and embrace all the things I spoke about hating in my post just so I can avoid Javascript. You can't win
- mxuribe 5y ago
  I was a web developer in the late 90s/early 2000s, then moved to low-level management...and over the years, i might touch a little script here or there, and maybe code up a boring website...but nothing needing such an expansive pipeline. Well, in the last 2 years or so, i've been interested (from an intellectual perspective) to start coding again...But, honestly, the cognitive load is enough that backend seems more straightforward for my brain now. (To clarify, i'm not s aying that backend work is easy, just that for me and my brain it seems more straightforward to tackle/learn.) Sure, nowadays browsers support css and javascriot far better than back in the day, but there's still seemingly so much to think about and do for front-end work that i'm moving more towards backend stuff...for now i'm just playing with stuff (sicne i do not do this anymore at my dayjob, and in fact haven't done it for over 15 yrs now), but if i lose my job or needed to drastically change my career (and head back to development), there's no way that i would enjoy the front-end...i would definitely choose the backend type of work. Maybe that's just me...but yeah, web dev (at least front-end) for me seems to have become insane.
- potta_coffee 5y ago
  I learned Go, switched to almost all backend work and infrastructure. Now I spend most of my time building infrastructure and tooling, and I couldn't be happier. I'm (or was?) a pretty competent front-end developer but I just can't do it anymore. I can still build a good front-end product if I need to, but I just can't get along with the new-school front-end guys that think they know everything and want to reinvent the wheel constantly.
Zelphyr 5y ago
I've been writing Javascript since it was in beta. I love Javascript as a language but, I almost completely agree with what you're saying for all the reasons you laid out.
akudha 5y ago
What stack do you use, to avoid JS? I was reading about Phoenix framework which promises to lessen the use of JS, I have no experience with it though. Also, how easy (or hard) is it to get a backend only job? I'd like to avoid CSS/JS completely, but unable to find such jobs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
the__alchemist 5y ago
I appreciate your observations, but don't agree with your conclusion: Javascript provides a decent API for interacting with the DOM dynamically. I understand you're frustrated with culture, community, and tooling, but you can still use Javascript without these to make web pages interactive in a way you can't do pure server-side. The MDN web docs are a great place to start.

the_only_law 5y ago

> The javascript world in particular suffered greatly from people carving up a name and conferences for themselves by building frankly ridiculous tools that the vast majority of people don't even need to reach for. But FOMO takes over. Then you realize your resume is getting screened out at half the jobs look look at because you "missed out". FWIW it happens on the backend too, see docker, k8s, and all the related container infra I “missed out on”

davzie 5y ago

This is without joke what I'm actually thinking about doing. I just can't get on with Javascript, and that's with 4 / 5 years of Vue development. I hate that I can't just come back to a project 6 months later and build it. Something always breaks. Everything feels super fragile. So I might just learn Go and stick to backend only and embrace all the things I spoke about hating in my post just so I can avoid Javascript. You can't win

mxuribe 5y ago
I was a web developer in the late 90s/early 2000s, then moved to low-level management...and over the years, i might touch a little script here or there, and maybe code up a boring website...but nothing needing such an expansive pipeline. Well, in the last 2 years or so, i've been interested (from an intellectual perspective) to start coding again...But, honestly, the cognitive load is enough that backend seems more straightforward for my brain now. (To clarify, i'm not s aying that backend work is easy, just that for me and my brain it seems more straightforward to tackle/learn.) Sure, nowadays browsers support css and javascriot far better than back in the day, but there's still seemingly so much to think about and do for front-end work that i'm moving more towards backend stuff...for now i'm just playing with stuff (sicne i do not do this anymore at my dayjob, and in fact haven't done it for over 15 yrs now), but if i lose my job or needed to drastically change my career (and head back to development), there's no way that i would enjoy the front-end...i would definitely choose the backend type of work. Maybe that's just me...but yeah, web dev (at least front-end) for me seems to have become insane.
potta_coffee 5y ago
I learned Go, switched to almost all backend work and infrastructure. Now I spend most of my time building infrastructure and tooling, and I couldn't be happier. I'm (or was?) a pretty competent front-end developer but I just can't do it anymore. I can still build a good front-end product if I need to, but I just can't get along with the new-school front-end guys that think they know everything and want to reinvent the wheel constantly.

Zelphyr 5y ago

I've been writing Javascript since it was in beta. I love Javascript as a language but, I almost completely agree with what you're saying for all the reasons you laid out.

akudha 5y ago

What stack do you use, to avoid JS? I was reading about Phoenix framework which promises to lessen the use of JS, I have no experience with it though. Also, how easy (or hard) is it to get a backend only job? I'd like to avoid CSS/JS completely, but unable to find such jobs.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

the__alchemist 5y ago

I appreciate your observations, but don't agree with your conclusion: Javascript provides a decent API for interacting with the DOM dynamically. I understand you're frustrated with culture, community, and tooling, but you can still use Javascript without these to make web pages interactive in a way you can't do pure server-side. The MDN web docs are a great place to start.