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by ChrisPebble 1421 days ago
This is definitely true sometimes, but the “wrong” kind of experience can definitely hamper people.

I have a highly skilled senior developer with a desktop app development background who joined our web team, he’s excellent at many tasks but keeps getting tripped up when dealing with state. He logically knows how it works, but his muscle memory when programming is so used to being able to rely on state that it’s hard for him stop letting those concepts leak in and trip him up.

He’s still an amazing asset to the team, but in this case he does have some experience that’s hampering him in a new role.
4 comments
crispyambulance 1421 days ago
> He’s still an amazing asset to the team, but in this case he does have some experience that’s hampering him in a new role.

OK, but how much could it possibly "hamper" him if he's still an "amazing asset"? Is it a permanent condition? Or is it just something that you noticed once or twice and made a mental note of?

We all have gaps and shortcomings. Overcoming them is a matter of practice, but if someone is second-guessing and judging every brain-fart, that's not good for anyone.

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ChrisPebble 1421 days ago
This was just an example where someone with no experience may have had an advantage. They would have had to learn as well, but wouldn’t be fighting against their muscle memory.

We all have strengths and weaknesses. I was arguing against the concept that this can all be attributed to ageism. That there are types of experience that can hamper you.

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nnoitra 1421 days ago
Lol, it's web development it's not rocket science. He doesn't need to wait for the next reincarnation cycle before he can be made fresh again to learn Redux.
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alexalx666 1421 days ago
What’s rocket science is the amount of boilerplate and unnecessary abstractions u need to deal with in the name of team scalability
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quickthrower2 1421 days ago
State management is also a thorn for desktop apps that need to talk to a server. Or even desktop apps that need to use a local data store, and whose UI has effects not stored when saving. E.g. this is why the MVVM pattern exists in WPF (the last desktop platform I worked on). And things like Reactive Extensions.

JS/React in some sense is just using a high level desktop development language, fetch is rpc, and the server is ... the server.

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postalrat 1421 days ago
Probably because what you call state he calls globals.
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