Yeah, that tracks.
At work someone estimated adding a section of static content to a page that uses React as 3 story points.
They were searching for components that would style the header and paragraph elements just as they wanted them, but were coming up short.
Instead I simply added it with html elements and a couple of lines of CSS.
5 minutes. Done.
😐
I thought ambagious was a typo of ambiguous. New word day!
Holding their hand through one page in vanilla JS is a great investment in your junior dev if this is an issue
I long ago stopped getting caught up in “that discussion” about recent trends despite a stream of people lobbing leading questions to get the ball rolling. Because I also try to not do so more rudely than necessary, I have developed several diplomatically worded (or at least ambiguous enough to float opaquely off to the side of the offense spectrum) ways of essentially saying the following: The simplest and cheapest way of [A] learning the “computer science” end of software is by becoming proficient in Lisp, [B] learning the “engineering” end of software by becoming proficient in Forth, [C] learning how “busywork” is a dangerous and demoralising thing to confuse with “actual work” by maintaining some Java code, [D] learning how insidious and self-sabotaging “expert beginner syndrome” is by reading a lot of the relevent code-reviews and blogposts when maintaining Javascript & Python projects, [E] learning how mob-mentality and populism can lead to selective blindness and architectural stubbornness by working with large volumes of C & C++ code, [F] learning how it is all really abstraction-layers over something akin to an old-shool phone switchboard by working with Assembler, [G] learning how the only work with longevity is that which stands on the shoulders of giants by using Fortran libraries, [H] learning how the mere act of developing using languages with baked-in discipline can be inherently educational by using DbC/TDD/BDD/dependent-type/formally-verifying/etc based languages (SPARK-Ada, Haskell, Eiffel, ACL2, Rust, etc), and then [I] learning how - after a certain level of experience - the languages, frameworks, and tools become less important than the engineers’s mindset and the work that happens both before and after the fingers hit the keyboard…by finding semi-performant techniques for implementing masochistic things like a VM and a network stack in Bash script (as hobby tasks, not for real use). If they are coming from a more hands-on/hardware background I also recommend [J] how eye-opening it is to maintain your own customized LibreCMC image flashed onto an open router (the older/smaller the HW the better, because you have to be increasingly creative with your kernel & OS configs), and [K] how educational it is getting a RISC-V working on an FPGA. I top it off by saying that [L] despite coding on-and-off since my start with z80 assembler on an Amstrad in the mid-80s I still feel like a beginner with so much to learn, and [M] that fact is by far the part I love most about the field (not just field of “work” but of “mental endeavour”) - far more than status/seniority/raises. I find I don’t get bombarded so much with JS-framework-du-jour zealotry and expert-beginnerism after that.
I swear this isn’t a get off my lawn post
Proceeds to spend 5 paragraphs complaining about what people call the original Javascript. He has some valid points, but this is very much an older developer complaining about the new generation of devs.
new generation of devs
The new generation of devs sadly has a lot of people that only can type what they want to achieve into ChatGPT and blindly copy whatever code snippet it comes up with. But they can’t develop. Nor do they understand code written by others. They’re the reason things like NodeJS’s is-even package exists.
This is a generalization that has some merit. but ultimately, generalizing an entire group of people and making assumptions about them isn’t a good way to judge an individuals ability to code.
See what they can do, and then judge.
You must have missed the part where I said a lot of people, not all of them. There are people calling themselves “developer” that shine during the hiring process, but then can’t implement a random feature if there’s no ready-to-use library for it.
However, this doesn’t mean that there still aren’t lots of actual developers around, that know what they’re doing and can actually code in an actual programming language.
If you want to play true Scotsman, the embedded devs like to make fun of the web devs for being scared of bitfields and refusing to do logic with anything other than string matching and manipulation.
. . .
Secretly it’s partially because we’re absolutely terrified of strings in any form and simply refuse to use them.
There are a lot of sub disciplines to the field, some benefit a lot from GPT or blindly copying from SA, some don’t, but that’s ok either way. Keep your skill sets broad and you’ll survive.
This isn’t the new generation of devs. This is just new devs. Some people refuse to grow out of this stage.
I’ve heard of the term “expert beginners”.
I dunno some of these feel like fundamentals that any web dev should know.
You’re gonna have headaches down the road if you don’t know hiw static html works.
