4 ms·

I seem to notice this particularly often with a subset of developers. People who have a very strong "who moved my cheese" mindset. They are used to doing things

by whack 5y ago

I seem to notice this particularly often with a subset of developers. People who have a very strong "who moved my cheese" mindset. They are used to doing things a certain way. An approach that is simple to understand, but takes a very long time to get anything done. Ie, writing vanilla HTML without any frameworks. Besides, they aren't the ones paying for a team of developers, so they don't really see a downside in spending 1 month to do something that could have been done in a week. And then all of a sudden, everything starts changing. Nobody wants to hire a vanilla JS/HTML developer anymore, they want react developers. And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time. They decide to try learning react, but find themselves with a tough problem they haven't dealt with in a while - being outside their comfort zone. They are so used to doing things a certain way. They know exactly how to do it. They can do it blindfolded. And all of a sudden, they find themselves having to change everything up. Overnight, they go from feeling like experts to feeling like novices. And they hate it. If they pushed through it, they would eventually gain mastery over it and learn to evaluate this new technology fairly on its merits. But they never do master this new technology. Feeling like a newbie is too psychologically painful. But they also recognize how much of a disadvantage they are at by not riding this wave that is taking over the industry. And so, rather than expressing indifference or acknowledging personal taste, they lash out with tremendous resentment and anger. > No, I will not be polite and call it something else because it is truly sheer stupidity. In the so-called modern day it's like everyone - except a few - has dropped their brain on the floor. Has everyone except the "unix greybeards" gone mad!? I get it. Change is scary. But it gets even scarier when you try to resist it instead of embracing it.

phist_mcgee 5y ago
You've hit the nail on the head. Greybeards now literally have grey beards. It must be hard to have pioneered software development, and watch it change under your feet at an escalating rate. I think the measures of a good engineer in the 80s/90s was more focused around 'hacker' culture. Speed, memory footprint, 'cleverness'. These days, a good engineer can scale, be flexible, and is a polyglot. I think the goal posts have shifted for the old schoolers, and it may be just one of those things. As they say, evolve or die.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  I’ll just sit on the sidelines, taking hackily-written messes of software written under tight deadlines and performance improve the heck out of it and make my money being able to deliver that narrow area of value, thank you :) Some of us “evolve” by becoming specialists. Edit: and I’ll take backend code written by a skilled backend engineer and infra code written by a skilled dev ops person over all-of-it written by a “polyglot/front-end-dev-on-assignment” every day of the week. Just keep us away from the front end, we can’t make things pretty or interactive for garbage.
Hermitian909 5y ago
> And then all of a sudden, everything starts changing. Nobody wants to hire a vanilla JS/HTML developer anymore, they want react developers. And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time. Don't want to support the author, but I want to say this has not been my experience. It seems to me that for most types of web pages web development is slower than in the old days. HTML and JQuery were really good for what were mostly static pages with a small amount of logic and state which is still what most web pages are. However feature rich applications were a mess using older tools. Code organization was difficult and you had almost no hope of keeping complex state lined up in the UI, React has been a godsend for this kind of work. But developers as a whole are very junior (iirc as of this year the median dev has 4 years of experience) and I think most can't pick which tools suit their use case.
danjac 5y ago
> And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time. If that were true, then great, it would represent a genuine step forward. Most of the time, you get a webapp that looks the same, works the same, but takes longer to develop (with a larger team of specialists), fails at basic accessibility, fails at SEO, is more brittle, buggy and harder to maintain. And not to generalize but those React "kiddies" are very much everything-looks-like-a-nail guys. Because they lack breadth of experience and training they'll shove that one tool into every project, even where it makes no sense.

by whack 5y ago

phist_mcgee 5y ago

You've hit the nail on the head. Greybeards now literally have grey beards. It must be hard to have pioneered software development, and watch it change under your feet at an escalating rate. I think the measures of a good engineer in the 80s/90s was more focused around 'hacker' culture. Speed, memory footprint, 'cleverness'. These days, a good engineer can scale, be flexible, and is a polyglot. I think the goal posts have shifted for the old schoolers, and it may be just one of those things. As they say, evolve or die.

t-writescode 5y ago
I’ll just sit on the sidelines, taking hackily-written messes of software written under tight deadlines and performance improve the heck out of it and make my money being able to deliver that narrow area of value, thank you :) Some of us “evolve” by becoming specialists. Edit: and I’ll take backend code written by a skilled backend engineer and infra code written by a skilled dev ops person over all-of-it written by a “polyglot/front-end-dev-on-assignment” every day of the week. Just keep us away from the front end, we can’t make things pretty or interactive for garbage.

Hermitian909 5y ago

> And then all of a sudden, everything starts changing. Nobody wants to hire a vanilla JS/HTML developer anymore, they want react developers. And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time. Don't want to support the author, but I want to say this has not been my experience. It seems to me that for most types of web pages web development is slower than in the old days. HTML and JQuery were really good for what were mostly static pages with a small amount of logic and state which is still what most web pages are. However feature rich applications were a mess using older tools. Code organization was difficult and you had almost no hope of keeping complex state lined up in the UI, React has been a godsend for this kind of work. But developers as a whole are very junior (iirc as of this year the median dev has 4 years of experience) and I think most can't pick which tools suit their use case.

danjac 5y ago

> And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time. If that were true, then great, it would represent a genuine step forward. Most of the time, you get a webapp that looks the same, works the same, but takes longer to develop (with a larger team of specialists), fails at basic accessibility, fails at SEO, is more brittle, buggy and harder to maintain. And not to generalize but those React "kiddies" are very much everything-looks-like-a-nail guys. Because they lack breadth of experience and training they'll shove that one tool into every project, even where it makes no sense.