Post by @polotek@social.polotek.net

@polotek@social.polotek.net

2024-06-14 23:30 UTC

What's even worse is that I believe a lot of this energy is wasted. People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away. And when the stack changes again, these folks are going to be at a serious disadvantage when they have to adapt away from what they learned. It's a deep disservice to people's professional careers, and it's going to cause a lot of heartache later.

Replies (6)

@polotek@social.polotek.net 2024-06-14 23:35

On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it's a big part of why we're seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can't. They are trying and failing because the tools being recommended to them are just not approachable enough. And at the same time, they're being convinced that learning fundamentals is a waste of time because it's so different from what everybody is talking about.

Open ##2300313
@tsturm@famichiki.jp 2024-06-14 23:50

@polotek@social.polotek.net 100% agree. Buying into a framework as a career choice is risky and ultimately that domain knowledge will be worthless. There is this very strange tribalism around frontend frameworks that has always annoyed me and made me not get deep into any of them - in the long run this has actually been a good thing.

Open ##2300329
@linus@schreibt.jetzt 2024-06-15 00:22

@polotek@social.polotek.net I don't do frontend stuff much, but I picked it up for a personal project recently and started by writing HTML and JS and CSS just like I learnt in the early 2000s. It got me quite far but also showed me why I might want to use something like React, which made no sense to me before I'd built a fair bit of functionality without.

Open ##2300330
@mez@mastodon.nz 2024-06-15 00:32

@polotek@social.polotek.net This has been painfully obvious to me as someone who started on web fundamentals in the front end but the last couple of years has been floundering in the backend because I’ve only been taught to use frameworks stacked on abstractions and conventions.

Open ##2300334
@kickstink@mas.to 2024-06-15 10:35

@polotek@social.polotek.net wow this hit home hard. I spent ~7 yrs as a “front end dev” writing client-side JS for 3rd party scripts, plug-ins for products, browser extensions, but no/little actual UI dev. I learned loads about HTTP, JSON, JS build tooling, telemetry, vanilla DOM scripting. Then the company pivoted hard and suddenly I’m building react dashboards. UX debt got out of control quickly since that wasn’t taken seriously at product level. Half my week became design meetings.

Open ##2300339
@urlyman@mastodon.social 2024-06-19 08:30

@polotek@social.polotek.net design tangent. There’s also this https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112639869593202034

Open ##2300342