[throwaway2k04]

I feel like the frontend community is suffering from the "eternal september" problem. Like PHP, it is very easy to get started so you get a lot of inexperienced developers writing very opinionated blogs that are shared with other inexperienced people who can't see the flaws. Interestingly it seems that the PHP community has matured and now consist of very reasonable and experienced "leaders", while the JS/TS community as a whole is still a long way from maturity. Don't get me wrong, there are many excellent JS/TS developers, but they face an endless stream of adversity.

In my previous startup the frontend developers decided to develop their own design library from scratch. My suggestion was to start with an established library and just adjust the style to match our look, but they wanted full control and ownership of the code. 3 years later, most of them left for new jobs and the library only contains a very basic set of components. Apparently accessibility and the rest of the "remaining 80%" part of the "80% completed" components were more difficult than they assumed. At least they had fun and could pad their resumes when they applied for new jobs, leaving others to maintain their m

This mindset was so different from the backend teams in the same startup. They preferred stable and known frameworks and libraries, and focused on the business logic. I had a feeling that the backend teams just got stuff down with little drama, while the frontend team was engaged in endless debates and rewrites. They had their own issues of course, but once they had fought the battle of choosing which language and stack to use, they stuck with it.

I worked with both and tried to stay away from most of the discussions, but it is clear to me that autonomy only works when you have a good balance of senior and junior developers that can have a discussion with the others without needing to "win" every time. As a senior developer myself, I have often learned new approaches from junior developers who have found a problem and dug in deep. Unfortunately I have seen too many senior developers and junior developers not listening to good advice from each other. The juniors think the seniors are outdated, while the seniors think the juniors are not capable.