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As a JavaScript developer who has been doing this work since before jQuery became popular I sadly agree. It appears there is an arms race to the bottom, as in

As a JavaScript developer who has been doing this work since before jQuery became popular I sadly agree. It appears there is an arms race to the bottom, as in how low can we lower the bar of acceptability for prospective employment candidates. I can remember back in the day at Travelocity they couldn't hire JavaScript developers to save their business. A $100 million business and the darling of the travel industry could not hire competent front end developers at all. Its how I became a developer, involuntary reassignment from designer. I can also remember Travelocity trying to solve this problem with GWT (Google Web Toolkit). This mistake of an application compiled Java to JavaScript for people who probably should not have been writing either. Its all good so long as the code never needs changes or updates at which point Java developers wanted JavaScript developers to fix their obfuscated code. How hard could writing this rinky dink language possibly be? Back in those days there were some actual challenges, but they were an inch deep and a mile wide. There were many technical areas to own, but only two separated the grossly incompetent from the barely employable: * Cross browser compatibility (IE made this more challenging). * The DOM. Then, just as now, tree models broke the souls of many software developers. I have never figured this out, because elementary schools are able to explain abstract concepts as tree models to children, but many adults cannot and will never understand the idea on even the most primitive level. jQuery came and saved the day. No more walking tree models. Everything is now a chained method or a CSS selector through a very slow Sizzle engine. Now everybody and their dog could add events and text to a web page so long as they could read the jQuery API. In hindsight none of this is surprising in the least. The surprising part is the compensation. Back in the day when the work was hard front-end developers were paid next to nothing. You were much better off being a Java developer where you could barely have a pulse and earn 2-3x as much. As the problems got easier and the number of available candidates blossomed the compensation surprisingly went up... slowly.

Timothycquinn 5y ago
I remember my management trying to get me to take over a GWT based spreadsheet like app for managing FMEA's. The developer only used it because he did not now JavaScript and had no desire to learn. It was developed with zero thought into debugging. Needless to say, I punted that app over to another developer to handle as I saw it was going to fail miserably after the first demonstration and my initial questions to the developer. That project was an abject failure after the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at it.

Timothycquinn 5y ago

I remember my management trying to get me to take over a GWT based spreadsheet like app for managing FMEA's. The developer only used it because he did not now JavaScript and had no desire to learn. It was developed with zero thought into debugging. Needless to say, I punted that app over to another developer to handle as I saw it was going to fail miserably after the first demonstration and my initial questions to the developer. That project was an abject failure after the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at it.