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"Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. In your thirties, you're more likely to have a stable relati

"Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. In your thirties, you're more likely to have a stable relationship and kids to care for. If the tools you learned in your twenties age out of relevance, then you may well have a hard time retraining to new tools while raising small kids.

schwartzworld 5y ago
> If the tools you learned in your twenties age out of relevance If someone learned React in your 20s and then "aged out", they must have been an early adopter. React is only 9 years old and most developers didn't start learning it in 2013. And it's far from irrelevant: https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React > "Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. Le meme never gets old.
- NateEag 5y ago
  Yes, if you learned React you'd have a decent shelf life still. What if you learned classic AngularJS, due to go unsupported in a month and a half? What if you threw in with ExtJS ages ago and the enterprise corp you've been using it for just downsized and outsourced your project? Maybe you were an EmberJS aficionado but can't find new gigs using it. I worked on a greenfield project in Backbone/Thorax/Mustache a number of years back but haven't seen any of those in the wild since. Maybe you love Elm but can't find any places that will hire you to use it. Ditto using Clojure on the frontend. Picking the winner is a great trick, but my point was that if you didn't (or just the companies you worked for didn't), you may find yourself in a bit of a hole, specifically if you have a lot of other responsibilities in your life.
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    Skills transfer across frameworks and even languages. If you're good at Elm or Clojure, you would be great at React. Vue owes a lot of its structure to the original Angular (or at least it did when I learned it forever ago).
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Sure, skills do apply across frameworks and languages. The hundred stupid things you need to know about any given framework don't, though. To be clear, I'm not thinking about people who've used lots of languages and tools here. I've done time working for huge corporations for whom software is a cost center, and it's easy to find people in those contexts who are competent with the tools they know but have narrow enough experience that moving to something else is difficult for them. The "average Joe" programmer's experience is what I'm thinking of here.
- Kavelach 5y ago
  Aside from what NateEag said, React is one thing, but the tooling is a completely different topic. When it comes to building your frontend, there was grunt and gulp (that I'm aware of), now the tools that get most love are I think webpack and esbuild. I didn't do anything with esbuild yet, but the way that applications are built changed a lot during the years, and webpack is much different that whatever there was before. Also, all of those tools are massive pains in your ass if something breaks, because debugging what actually broke is hard when your build process becomes more complicated.

schwartzworld 5y ago

> If the tools you learned in your twenties age out of relevance If someone learned React in your 20s and then "aged out", they must have been an early adopter. React is only 9 years old and most developers didn't start learning it in 2013. And it's far from irrelevant: https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React > "Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. Le meme never gets old.

NateEag 5y ago
Yes, if you learned React you'd have a decent shelf life still. What if you learned classic AngularJS, due to go unsupported in a month and a half? What if you threw in with ExtJS ages ago and the enterprise corp you've been using it for just downsized and outsourced your project? Maybe you were an EmberJS aficionado but can't find new gigs using it. I worked on a greenfield project in Backbone/Thorax/Mustache a number of years back but haven't seen any of those in the wild since. Maybe you love Elm but can't find any places that will hire you to use it. Ditto using Clojure on the frontend. Picking the winner is a great trick, but my point was that if you didn't (or just the companies you worked for didn't), you may find yourself in a bit of a hole, specifically if you have a lot of other responsibilities in your life.
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  Skills transfer across frameworks and even languages. If you're good at Elm or Clojure, you would be great at React. Vue owes a lot of its structure to the original Angular (or at least it did when I learned it forever ago).
  - NateEag 5y ago
    Sure, skills do apply across frameworks and languages. The hundred stupid things you need to know about any given framework don't, though. To be clear, I'm not thinking about people who've used lots of languages and tools here. I've done time working for huge corporations for whom software is a cost center, and it's easy to find people in those contexts who are competent with the tools they know but have narrow enough experience that moving to something else is difficult for them. The "average Joe" programmer's experience is what I'm thinking of here.
Kavelach 5y ago
Aside from what NateEag said, React is one thing, but the tooling is a completely different topic. When it comes to building your frontend, there was grunt and gulp (that I'm aware of), now the tools that get most love are I think webpack and esbuild. I didn't do anything with esbuild yet, but the way that applications are built changed a lot during the years, and webpack is much different that whatever there was before. Also, all of those tools are massive pains in your ass if something breaks, because debugging what actually broke is hard when your build process becomes more complicated.