The same phenomena existed in the 90s. Enterprise and corporate bureaucracy will always be the main driver in terms of which skill sets appear most in-demand. They have been since the dawn of computing.
The modern misguided infatuation with Javascript is just another boring chapter in the same repeated story. In 15 years it will be something else.
My point isn't to convince anyone of anything. Indeed, most people who just want a job and just don't care will simply comply with whatever is popularized by enterprise bureaucracy.
But thoughtful people ought to remember there's no need for anxiety. Great developers survived the 90s and made lots of money without ever writing a single line of Java or enterprise C++. Great developers survived the 00's and made a lot of money without ever writing a line of enterprise C# or even ever opening Visual Studio.
And great developers will survive the 2010s and 2020s and make a lot of money without ever writing a line of Javascript.
So... If one was a great developer through the 90s to today and didn't write C++, C#, Java, or a line of JavaScript, what the hell were they writing? PHP? Perl?
Great developers are great because they love what they do, they're critical thinkers, and they've got an ability to find creative solutions to problems. Great developers are not great because they hate 'the man' and refuse to write code in the languages put forth by 'the bureaucracy'.
Bureaucrats didn't invent any of these languages or technologies. Developers (some of them great) did. You know who guides technology platforms in companies? The developers and the software architects. If Java and C# couldn't get the job done well for writing services and applications, nobody would use them.
If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else.
People that stand on the sidelines bitching about how GREAT PEOPLE don't do that without joining the fray and making it great to work with them often get left behind and forgotten.
Help make it better or get out of the way, but it's not a conspiracy by Big Company bureaucrats to trick us into creating the most engaging applications deployed to the most users easier than we've ever had it.
> If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else.
This is circular: "Because we use the thing, it's the best. If it weren't the best, we wouldn't use it. We use it because it's the best."
Companies use non-best things all the time, even when the better options are cheaper, easier, faster, safer, etc. Political control, gate keeping, nepotism, kickbacks, drumming up showy re-orgs and migrations and initiatives for short-term executive bonus optimization ... there are endless reasons why executives and management couldn't care less what "the best" solutions look like and will use unequivocally crap solutions, solutions that are demonstrably wasteful and inefficient, if it gets them their short term bonus or promotion, or whatever.
> Help make it better or get out of the way...
Complaining is perhaps the most useful tool there is for effecting positive social change. It's not only helpful, but necessary and vital that we keep whining incessantly about how unreasonably poor a tool Javascript is, and how most of the work people choose to do with it or choose to invest in is clouded by mistaken impressions about the usefulness of that work.
Most of what we have done to the "biggest distribution platform in history" is to utterly destroy the value it held, to make it a cumbersome, psychologically manipulative stream of noise that, while still providing value, doesn't provide nearly as much value as it could if we just simply stopped fucking it up with poor web development priorities.
It seems we won't rest until there's an ad tagged to every single transmitted bit. And we can't slow down at all, lest short term bonuses be lost, so we have to evolve our way to every-bit-an-ad using whatever bad tools there are now (Javascript) as opposed to stepping back a bit to think critically about what we're doing, and what good tools would be to actually solve the problems we should solve.
Instead, libertarian brogrammer founders and VCs just spew Randian nonsense that no, this is the market economics, and if every-bit-an-ad via bad Javascript is what makes money, then it must be what the world at large wants. Ugh...
The modern misguided infatuation with Javascript is just another boring chapter in the same repeated story. In 15 years it will be something else.
My point isn't to convince anyone of anything. Indeed, most people who just want a job and just don't care will simply comply with whatever is popularized by enterprise bureaucracy.
But thoughtful people ought to remember there's no need for anxiety. Great developers survived the 90s and made lots of money without ever writing a single line of Java or enterprise C++. Great developers survived the 00's and made a lot of money without ever writing a line of enterprise C# or even ever opening Visual Studio.
And great developers will survive the 2010s and 2020s and make a lot of money without ever writing a line of Javascript.