[Lapz]

I often see people say “JS is unstable,you’re always rewriting your code for the latest and greatest framework” and I always wonder where do you work? If I told the people I report to I can’t deliver that for you because we’re rewriting the app, I’d be out of the door soon.

The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you follow and trust me your life will be golden.

[phendrenad2]

There was a time between 2015 and 2020 when framework fatigue was a real thing. People were jumping between angular, ember, react, vue, and if you were unlucky enough to choose react, Crazy Mad Scientist Dan Abramov was telling you YoureDoingItWrong(TM) every other tuesday and prompting everyone to rewrite their app in shame (even though they wrote it the way that was trendy LAST tuesday).

Since then, things have settled down a LOT.

[RedShift1]

Yeah true especially if you were trying to use Typescript. Every npm update broke things.

[owebmaster]

> Since then, things have settled down a LOT.

Truth being told, Crazy Mad Scientist Dan Abramov is still doing the same thing (React Server Components) but we are not falling for it anymore

[vasachi]

Usual arguments for "upgrading" are:

* We can't hire specialists for older frameworks.

* We can't generate positive hipe over older technologies.

* New technologies are better, so we will deliver features faster.

In reality, it's almost always resume-driven development.

[al_borland]

> In reality, it's almost always resume-driven development

This is what drives me crazy. I’ve been at my company for a couple decades. I want stability and long term health of the company.

The resume driven development isn’t even from the engineers, it’s from the leadership. An IT leader gets hired from the outside, starts a big project that will look good on the resume, then midway through the project, they are just far enough to try and call it a success and leverage it into a new position. Now we have a leadership change in the middle of a giant foundational shift of the infrastructure. The new leader comes in and does the same thing. I don’t see how a company can survive this long term. It creates such fragility. People like me, with little interest in job hopping, aren’t looking to resume build. I’m looking to have the company’s operations run smoothly so customers have a reliable service, so we retain them as customers… and for a little peace and stability myself. These resume building leaders make that difficult and seem to actively work against the long term health of the company. They aren’t interested in the next 10-20 years, they are only worried about their next job in 3-4 years, with no concern for the mess they leave behind.

I hope this is just a trend and it dies soon. The needless stress it has brought into my once simple life has been rather unpleasant.

[brulard]

It may be resume-driven, but that's the state of the world. If you fail to keep your team members and attract new ones as the team needs to grow, you are fighting a losing battle.

[al_borland]

Maybe all these needless technology shifts are the reason the team members are leaving.

[brulard]

I didn't see many needless ones, but I've seen many team members not wanting to hear about any change. It's hard enough to push a greatly needed change through management. Maybe there are places where they do it just for fun.

[al_borland]

The people I report to are the ones telling me to rewrite the same thing every other year on a new platform and stack. It drives me mad. Challenging these ideas risks my job.

For things they don’t care about, I am using very basic tools that have worked for the last 10+ years and will likely work fine for the next 20 years. This allows me to solve new problems instead of continuing to solve the same problem over again. At least that’s my goal. In reality, it allows the tools I need (but management doesn’t care about) to “just work”, freeing me up to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic for them. All of this is for internal tools. We’re just raising operating costs on things that have 0 impact on revenue. I don’t really understand the vision.

[eitland]

In 2017, I met modern frontend. In a few hectic months, I had to learn AngularJS, Gulp, Grunt, and some CSS improvement system (LESS or Sass or something). Then I moved on to Angular and worked with it for a couple of years. For the first time, it actually started to feel worth it. But what a churn in the beginning. Angular 2, 4, 5, 6, and I think up to 9 all dropped while I was still working with it.

Since then, I’ve mostly worked with React, which is blissfully productive and unexciting in the best way possible as long as we prevent people from pulling in CV-padding material like Redux.

Over the past few years, I’ve been hired into places where I’m once again upgrading codebases written in AngularJS (yep, it still exists), Elm, and jQuery. Everything gets rewritten to React, and after that we can hire people right out of school to maintain it (as long as we keep the CV-padding libraries out of it).

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying: even if you’ve been lucky enough to work in a place where people made good technical decisions years ago, and work in a place that treat their devs well enough that someone who still remembers how it works cares to work there —not everyone’s that lucky.

[dgb23]

To contrast: JS _the language_ is one of the most stable languages out there.