I don’t think it’s that “all new ideas are bad” but more that it’s not always efficient to be the guinea pig. I have a pharmacist friend who says he tries to avoid taking any medication the first five years it’s on the market. Not because he thinks it’s bad but because he’s seen enough new medication to know that it takes about that long to really get a good picture of the risks and interactions.
I dont mean to be offensive, but usually those things take like a month to learn if you're bad at it. People talk about that grind like it's anything other than the most basic of gestures for tracking the rapidly moving target of browser technology.
If this is what we mean by, "being a bad programmer" I guess I get it now. A refusal to actually track the state of the industry, instead being told by employers what matters.
> A refusal to actually track the state of the industry, instead being told by employers what matters.
Yeeees... so instead of being "told" by your employers, you're "told" by the hype-train? How exactly is this better?
Being fed up of the constant churn in JS frameworks is an entirely valid position.
Sure, maybe it only takes a month to learn the latest framework. Maybe it only takes a couple of weeks. But maybe I'd rather spend those 2 weeks doing something else that I consider to be more valuable (it's called opportunity cost).
And what about all the gotchas and quirks that every framework has? The pathological performance edge-cases, and suchlike? The ones you only discover after weeks and months of in-depth use? I'll have to learn a whole new set of those.
And what about my "legacy" codebase that used the last framework du jour. Do I just ignore it? Do I convert it? Hmm. Wonder how long that will take, and what else I could be doing with that time.
Maybe you enjoy the churn: endlessly learning useless knowledge that will be of no value to you in a few short years because it's no longer trendy. Lucky you. For me it got boring, because I've got stuff to build.
> Yeeees... so instead of being "told" by your employers, you're "told" by the hype-train? How exactly is this better?
Because occasionally our peers are right? Do you really have so little respect for everyone in the industry around you that every new piece of tech that comes along, you just assume it is a mass of incompetence and marketing?
A diversity of perspectives, ideas and approaches is a fertile ground for personal growth. There are never any shortages of such hype trains.
And at least they're made by fellow software engineers. Not, you know, corporate hiring comittees.
> And what about all the gotchas and quirks that every framework has? The pathological performance edge-cases, and suchlike? The ones you only discover after weeks and months of in-depth use? I'll have to learn a whole new set of those.
Getting domain specific, you'd be doing that anyways because of how rapidly browsers are growing and changing.
> And what about my "legacy" codebase that used the last framework du jour. Do I just ignore it? Do I convert it? Hmm. Wonder how long that will take, and what else I could be doing with that time.
> Maybe you enjoy the churn: endlessly learning useless knowledge that will be of no value to you in a few short years because it's no longer trendy. Lucky you.
Why is it that the value of software is defined by if it is trendy 5 years later? That's a conflation of concerns I can't follow.
> For me it got boring, because I've got stuff to build.
For me, squatting on one stagnant pile of never-really-that-good technology building the same boring things over and over again at the behest of others is equally boring.
You suggest all the frameworks are poorly designed hype, but then decide you want to take an arbitrary moment in time (when you showed up, that fated day) and freeze everything there.
If you're unnecessarily spending a month a year on platform churn, that's nearly 10% loss of productivity right there. Doesn't seem like a good choice to me, unless you're genuinely gaining something important.
You can still learn the latest technologies so that you know what's potentially coming down the pipeline, while using the best mature tools for your bread and butter day to day work.
It also sounds like an excellent recipie for being utterly beholden to every industry trend that gains critical mass despite numerous examples of how sub-optimal it is.
It's a strategy for a big corporate hiring committee, not an individual worker.
Of course the actual successful software companies "build the next proven thing" so even for them, this "wait and see" strategy is clearly not effective.
I didn't get that from the article. It's more like: most of the new tech won't stick and if you aren't smart enough to discern what will stick and what not, then focus on learning tech that has already matured and been adopted. Remember, the advice is meant for programmers who aren't that good.