Ask HN: Should I move away from JavaScript based skillset because of saturation? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Should I move away from JavaScript based skillset because of saturation?

#41

Post by joshxyz » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #12

joshxyz wrote: post #2

maybe anecdotal but in my experience there is no saturation in devs who are doing things properly. im in a multinational company in a billion dollar industry yet our frontend code is reactjs without typescript, eslint misconfigured, stylelint not used, bad practices on use of react hooks, and many more. there are teams and devs that are out of touch on maximizing what tools are available out there. im not even saying…

My perception is that the vast majority of employers are lacking either the will or the experience to recognize skilled developers and the value of their skill. In other words, skill depth is borderline meaningless in job-hunting, as opposed to skill breadth. Do you think that perception is exaggerated/pessimistic?

i think of it as being a character with stats

having depth in technical skill is maxing out one stat

but there are more stats

- how you communicate, persuade, negotiate, and sell ideas

- how you work with the team, how you navigate office politics

- how you meet your kpi's, how relative your efforts are in capturing business value for the company

sometimes it's not our technical skills that determine our satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

personally i enjoy my technical skills more when i work on my personal projects. pure enjoyment lol.

Re: Ask HN: Should I move away from JavaScript based skillset because of saturation?

#42

Post by joshxyz » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 11:03 PM UTC

jimmychoozyx wrote: post #37

frfl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. Idk who downvoted me, but based on your reasonable response, doesn't seem like it was you. Ultimately, TS enforces those implicit comments you mentioned and adds some explicitness to the code. Whatever works for you and gets your job done But it's worth mentioning, TS with some of the strict settings disabled is basically JS but with some added benefits, primarily due to the TS type checker still being a…

Nah twas not I. While working with TS in VS Code, I liked the intellisense of TypeScript + VSCode... it was able to piece itself together better than vanilla JS-- it predicted which objects, functions, or files I would reference quite well. So, I'll give it that. I totally see a reason for it in the corporate realm of developer churn and in the vein of keeping projects very structured and stable. I might give it anot…

you're right i hate the damn overhead too.

i despised typescript for years until i tried it again recently. these days the developer tools are better.

prettier now formats it very well. eslint now lints it very well. tsx and ts-node now lets me run my ts files without compile step to js before i can run it with node. on frontend, vitejs has templates for react with typescript projects.

im a performance freak too, i currently use uwebsockets.js instead of express/fastify/hapi/koa. i wrote my own redis client instead of node-redis and ioredis. i fucking hate overhead too, haha.

i think my strongest preference on typescript stems from my frustration on very large projects. say thousands of commits every month, at that scale typescript really helps a lot in catching bugs before we even run our code.

Re: Ask HN: Should I move away from JavaScript based skillset because of saturation?

#43

Post by willsmith72 » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #40

willsmith72 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you hiring for? JavaScript doesn't just mean frontend. I am much more interested in how people pick up new tech and interesting projects than the specifics of the language. With modern libraries and frameworks I don't think you need deep experts in particular languages anymore

> JavaScript doesn't just mean frontend. I would assume they know that. There are plenty of projects that don't have nodejs backends.

> I do believe getting real-world backend experience greatly increases your value

This would imply they don't or they don't value it nearly as much

Re: Ask HN: Should I move away from JavaScript based skillset because of saturation?

#44

Post by bwh2 » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

nassimsoftware wrote: post #23

bwh2 wrote: post #20

As a hiring manager who looks at a lot of resumes, I think your hunch is correct. I see a lot of junior to mid-level developers that primarily work in JS/TS/React. That market is heavily saturated and I regularly read posts on LinkedIn from these people about how difficult it is to find a job. The candidates that stand out from the pack are those with some tangible production backend experience in languages like C#,…

Would say working on backend projects with languages C#, Java, etc... a good idea if it's not possible to get work experience? I would do those projects, add them to my cv and apply to backend roles for example.

It would help both in demonstration of interest in learning that language further and in being able to pass technical interviews.

Re: Ask HN: Should I move away from JavaScript based skillset because of saturation?

#45

Post by bwh2 » Fri, Aug 11, 2023, 3:25 PM UTC

willsmith72 wrote: post #36

bwh2 wrote: post #20

As a hiring manager who looks at a lot of resumes, I think your hunch is correct. I see a lot of junior to mid-level developers that primarily work in JS/TS/React. That market is heavily saturated and I regularly read posts on LinkedIn from these people about how difficult it is to find a job. The candidates that stand out from the pack are those with some tangible production backend experience in languages like C#,…

What are you hiring for? JavaScript doesn't just mean frontend. I am much more interested in how people pick up new tech and interesting projects than the specifics of the language. With modern libraries and frameworks I don't think you need deep experts in particular languages anymore

Agreed. That was the point of my comment - there is an abundance of developers who just work in JS/TS/React and have not picked up new technologies. Adding C#, Java, SQL, etc. helps your marketability.