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| ▲ | austin-cheney 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | How many JavaScript developers in the workforce can write original applications without some colossal framework and an army of NPM packages? In 15 years of doing that work those people do not exist, at least statistically, and hiring does not encourage their selection. Most people doing this work, both in person and online, are extremely sensitive about this. It’s a hard reality to accept that if this free software went away most people doing the work wouldn’t be able to qualify their income in any significant way to their employer. | | |
| ▲ | tcoff91 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think that ultimately it’s the fault of the web platform. With just a bit of retraining those engineers that could not be productive without a ton of npm packages could ship an iPhone app written in Swift. JS’ standard library is abysmal. | | |
| ▲ | austin-cheney 3 days ago | parent [-] | | This sounds like blaming the victim. How do you on one hand call these people engineers, as if they are engineering something, and then on the other hand blame everything else for their inability to perform? That is weird. Its just a software platform. Would you really blame society for being too harsh if doctors, lawyers, police, teachers cannot do their jobs? It is weird to see so many people blame the web platform for hostility when its so much less challenging than it used to be. The most common cause of these frustrations I encountered while working in JavaScript is that developers are educated in something that looks like A, but JavaScript is not A, there is no training for JavaScript/Web, so therefore JavaScript/Web is hostile. As a self-taught developer that never made sense to me. | | |
| ▲ | tcoff91 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The web is not an application platform, it’s a document rendering platform that has been hacked together to be an application platform. Without libraries it’s incredibly hard to be productive building applications. It’s only with dependencies that the web becomes an acceptable application platform. Look at how much JS it takes to implement a material-ui textfield that automatically grows and shrinks. Building a date picker is a pain in the ass. Making sure those things follow all the arcane aria standards to be accessible is difficult. There’s no good reason why everyone should have to rebuild their own date picker. Without libraries the web is the hardest application platform to use by far if you are trying to build actual apps and not just websites with content. | | |
| ▲ | austin-cheney a day ago | parent [-] | | > Look at how much JS it takes to implement a material-ui textfield that automatically grows and shrinks. I would do that with CSS. > Building a date picker is a pain in the ass. Making sure those things follow all the arcane aria standards to be accessible is difficult. If you want to display a visual calendar then yes, mostly. However, if instead you make date picking relative to now then it becomes very simple. It’s just adding or subtracting numbers from Date.now(). You can even produce date spans super easily. I understand where you are going. When everything starts from a visual UI perspective the code is just an implementation detail except that it’s dense. If instead you start at from the implementation perspective of how it really works at the lowest level then everything just appears step by step. Nobody starts building beautiful skyscrapers from the visual exterior first. No, they lay the foundation, a boring slab of concrete around some grounding poles. |
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| ▲ | marcosdumay 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I dunno. Would you blame doctors if they were unable to perform in a single hospital and had a verifiably good track record anywhere else? | | |
| ▲ | jlaternman 2 days ago | parent [-] | | If in the other hospitals they were able to rely on the expertise of others, but in that single hospital they could not hide their lack of deep knowledge and that led to deaths? I think the answer of that analogy is obvious—though I realise it is an analogy, not directly comparable. |
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| ▲ | pavel_lishin 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, you're right about that - but how many construction workers could build a house without having access to pre-cut lumber, pre-sharpened tools, nailguns, power equipment, pre-cast nails, etc., etc? | | |
| ▲ | austin-cheney 3 days ago | parent [-] | | My neighbor works construction and my son did for a while. They were working on the new Texas Instruments silicon prefab. The people that do the actual work with their hands are expected to do just about everything. We are talking about advanced metal work in a place with liquid nitrogen and harmful chemical agents. The actual engineers just walk around to validate the work conforms to the written plans. That is why these large engineering companies prefer to hire only from labor unions in a location that is extremely anti-union, because the union has the social resources to validate the candidates in ways the employer does not. Even in that environment there are more experienced people who are 10x producers. | | |
| ▲ | em-bee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | that's an interesting point about unions in the US. if true. because in europe (at least in austria and germany, but i suspect it's the case in most countries) unions do not do any validation of their members. having a job in an industry IS your validation to be a union member. the union then negotiates work conditions and pay on your behalf. figuring out whether you are qualified is the companies job. |
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| ▲ | user34283 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It boils down to him feeling superior to web developers, who are far beneath him and couldn't possibly program with other tools. | | |
| ▲ | austin-cheney 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Actually, its the opposite. When you are no longer compatible to the workforce because you don't want waste all your time on the same basic literacy things over and over you start to feel extremely inferior when you cannot get a job. But the fact the concerns of superiority come up so repeatedly just serves to illustrate how much insecurity is baked into the workforce. Confident people don’t worry about high confidence in other people. |
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