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by user_agent 2184 days ago
JavaScript -> Startups that hire young, "dynamic" people doing what usually no one cares about (most of them must bankrupt by definition).

Java / C# -> The whole enterprise sector. Which is much, much bigger and people tend to know very little about it.

A lot of devs are funny I think. I come entirely from the enterprise sector where I have been working my whole life. Looking at a "startup lifestyle" it's hard for me to think about it seriously. Yes, there's FANG, but who'd like to work there knowing that there are more healthy options. Oh, yes - the people who think that kind of work is a paramount of what's possible ;) I'd prefer to work with people who think clearly, know their options, can assess risks for instance related with an inherent exotic approach of the JavaScript world. There's no place in enterprise for unproven methods like that. Corporations are like military. They must rely on what they use to support themselves. Therefore, what you prefer to do also depends on which people you like better - yuppies or older engineers, thinking a little bit more seriously about themselves. I'm a junior dev, I'm 34 though, and from the very start I had a feeling that there's something very, very wrong with those JavaScript young crowds out there. I went to a couple of meetups in my city, and it occurs that majority of them are the JavaScript ones... There's one serious C# group (I'm into that stack) and probably 100 JavaScript-ish ones. The quality of the people in the first one, their maturity plus how they think about technology, I consider fairly more reasonable for my personal taste. Hence, I won't get into the JS camp until there's no other choice. Years passed since my first epiphany of "There's something wrong with those JS people" and the feeling is only getting stronger. I can't argue about it logically, so I'm not going to claim that kind of approach is universal in any way, bu I must also say that after countless hours of discussions with the C# (and Java too) people, a lot of them shares that feelings. It's about philosophy, about how one think things should be done on the most fundamental level. I've seen in my life maybe a handful of really reasonable JS devs, which isn't the case in the C# or Java world at all...

I didn't refer to most of your questions, @Op. I just want you to consider which kind of people are your people. I also wonder how do you deal in your workplace with your specific mindset, which honestly seems like the one often found among Java devs, not the JS ones.

Myself, I prefer to work on big scale, important, enterprise projects. Startups are just not for me. But I also like to do my own stuff after work, and both Java and C# are very comfortable for doing that too. I just feel very hesitant with using technologies that seem to be better suited for building let's say prototypes. I'd rather prefer to start with a real thing.

For the rest of the people reading this post - try not to hate me. I'm not claiming who's a better individual because which language is being used. I'm purely referring to my own experiences as someone who's having I think a rather different background than most people in web development. I'd really like to better understand why I'm having the impressions I've been writing about.

On the other hand there's a ton of people swearing that JS is the one for them. And they usually too can't help me understand why it's so obvious for them, like I don't know how to make them understand that the existence of JS in an abomination... And that I can't wait when WebAssembly is going to be a standard ;)

So, the question remains - are we really that different in how we understand what technology is and how it should be done, or maybe we all have a big lesson to learn here that's going to come later in our professional endeavors? Maybe someone with A LOT of real world experience could help with answering it.

1 comments

I know quite a few banks that heavily invest in node.js. Velocity of full-stack JavaScript team is something that is hard to replicate. With node.js and Typescript you can get reasonable performance and decent safety/maintenance.

JavaScript's community is just bigger, there are people with different level of skill but as a whole it is more welcoming and progressive.

Yeah but what are the banks doing with Node JS? Also, is the single language that beneficial? There are all sorts of differences between typescript and node no?
Building services for user facing applications. Banks have multi tiered architecture. They have back-end services (transactions, batch jobs, risk, calculations, analytics etc) these would be written in mostly in Java/Python/Scala/C#/C++. You might have situation where there is multiple systems processing same transactions overnight. Banks also have quite a lot of user facing applications, most of these now use React/Angular but data fed to it will not be coming from same services that process transactions(security and ease of maintenance). You will but another service just for frontend application that access back-end services via limited API or event queue.

Keep in mind that there is also plenty of systems that are older than me and have massive teams. Banks are mixed bag. You can work in amazing cutting edge project or maintain project in dead language.

Chyzwar sounds very familiar to me. It's one of the characters in a famous Dan Simmons' series Hyperion. Are you Polish by any chance?

If that's the case, would you be willing to drop an example of a banking company there that's doing node.js (that would be the first time for me hearing anything about a large scale deployments of that tech in banking)?

yes, I am Polish.

Lloyds Banking Group is organizing JavaScript meetups[1] in Edinburgh. They even invite node.js core contributors on some talks. They're investing into full-stack JavaScript teams for the user facing applications.

JP Morgan and Chase. Even from the time I worked there was quite a lot of new projects created in node.js. Node.js became approved tech within company. Java is still most popular but teams have quite a bit of autonomy in choosing technology.

I also had RBS and Tesco Bank requiters contacting me for JS Full-stack jobs.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/react-edinburgh/