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I do front- and back-end web development, I have done that almost exclusively for years. It's not that skills degrade, it's that the tools evolve and change qui

I do front- and back-end web development, I have done that almost exclusively for years. It's not that skills degrade, it's that the tools evolve and change quickly, and teams move from one shiny thing to the next much faster in the front-end domain than in other areas. Without meaning to come off as condescending or rude, if you call yourself a professional programmer and you need to put in a lot of effort to adapt to the next version of React, you aren't senior. Adapting to rapid change is part of the career, and the only difference with front-end work is the mostly self-inflicted churn. HTML, CSS, Javascript are not changing month-to-month. Web sites I wrote in PHP and jQuery ten years ago still work. The key to keeping up with change in the software business (and it's the same, maybe worse, in the system admin domain) is to understand the core technologies and principles, which haven't changed dramatically in decades. It's far more important to understand HTTP (relatively unchanged for more than two decades) and how web browsers render (which changes very slowly) than it is to memorize every detail of how React hooks work this month. Excessive focus on languages and tools and always adopting the latest new thing is a sign of poor management and lack of focus -- and especially not focusing on delivering a product and adding business value. That can happen anywhere from the CEO on down but in my experience it mainly happens at the programmer team level, because playing with the latest dot release of Ruby or React is more fun than addressing business requirements. As I'm by now fond of saying, no company ever had the requirement "We need 2,000 more lines of Javascript code by next month." Nor does any company have the requirement "We need to move to the version of React released last week." If that's what you're concentrating on you don't understand business requirements.

bsder 5y ago
> Adapting to rapid change is part of the career, and the only difference with front-end work is the mostly self-inflicted churn. HTML, CSS, Javascript are not changing month-to-month. True, but if you are at an early stage of your career, keeping up with that churn is important as that's what your next FAANG job interviews for. Being stuck handling backend or infrastructure when the job was supposed to be "front end development" is not acceptable in a company the size of Spotify. If this were a startup, then the discussion would be very different.
- gregjor 5y ago
  I agree with everything you wrote. The author expected the "senior" title but the complaints in the article don't come across as experienced senior developer. It's a shame that FAANG companies, and those that emulate FAANG hiring practices, put so much emphasis on specific languages and algorithms, since those actually have very little to do with success as a developer, or adding value to the business. I understand the gatekeeping function of those hiring practices but I think it just reinforces a monoculture and tunnel vision focus on details. If Shopify told the author one thing then assigned something else that's a problem. One person might see an opportunity, another might interpret that as deception or poor management. I don't know what the author did about it. I would have discussed with my manager and tried to sort out the difference between my expectations (according to the job description and hiring process) and what actually happened. Some of my luckiest career breaks came from getting hired for A and ending up doing X. I even got sent to the wrong interviews once (by a FAANG company HR rep) and got a much better job than the one I was originally picked to interview for.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  > Being stuck handling backend or infrastructure when the job was supposed to be "front end development" is not acceptable Except...editing HTML templates is front end development. This guy is a React superfan and can't get his mind around anything else.
  - gregjor 5y ago
    When you write React code and edit ERB templates, isn't that full stack? ;-)
- ipaddr 5y ago
  If you are early in your career I would advise that person to stick around shopify and they might learn something. Shopify asked the person to do frontend work and the person thought they were doing backend work because they weren't use to editing html templates with react. We learn that this person might be a senior react developer but this person isn't a senior frontend developer. Shopify identified this and made the person an intermediate developer.

bsder 5y ago

> Adapting to rapid change is part of the career, and the only difference with front-end work is the mostly self-inflicted churn. HTML, CSS, Javascript are not changing month-to-month. True, but if you are at an early stage of your career, keeping up with that churn is important as that's what your next FAANG job interviews for. Being stuck handling backend or infrastructure when the job was supposed to be "front end development" is not acceptable in a company the size of Spotify. If this were a startup, then the discussion would be very different.

gregjor 5y ago
I agree with everything you wrote. The author expected the "senior" title but the complaints in the article don't come across as experienced senior developer. It's a shame that FAANG companies, and those that emulate FAANG hiring practices, put so much emphasis on specific languages and algorithms, since those actually have very little to do with success as a developer, or adding value to the business. I understand the gatekeeping function of those hiring practices but I think it just reinforces a monoculture and tunnel vision focus on details. If Shopify told the author one thing then assigned something else that's a problem. One person might see an opportunity, another might interpret that as deception or poor management. I don't know what the author did about it. I would have discussed with my manager and tried to sort out the difference between my expectations (according to the job description and hiring process) and what actually happened. Some of my luckiest career breaks came from getting hired for A and ending up doing X. I even got sent to the wrong interviews once (by a FAANG company HR rep) and got a much better job than the one I was originally picked to interview for.
mattmcknight 5y ago
> Being stuck handling backend or infrastructure when the job was supposed to be "front end development" is not acceptable Except...editing HTML templates is front end development. This guy is a React superfan and can't get his mind around anything else.
- gregjor 5y ago
  When you write React code and edit ERB templates, isn't that full stack? ;-)
ipaddr 5y ago
If you are early in your career I would advise that person to stick around shopify and they might learn something. Shopify asked the person to do frontend work and the person thought they were doing backend work because they weren't use to editing html templates with react. We learn that this person might be a senior react developer but this person isn't a senior frontend developer. Shopify identified this and made the person an intermediate developer.