Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

On the other hand, I think there is a bit too much fatalism in the article. Sometimes the kids are being stupid, and they need to be told so.

The vast majority of web apps could be built in 1/10th the code with server-side rendering and intercooler.js. All this client-side crap is wasted when you are trying to get text from computer A into data-store B and back again. It's the front-end equivalent of the J2EE debacle, but with better logos and more attractive people.

And people are starting to wake up[1][2]. It's up to us old guys to show the way back to the original simplicity of the web, incorporating the good ideas that have shown up along the way as well as all the good ideas[3] that have been forgotten. Yes, we'll be called dinosaurs, out of touch, and worse.

Well so what? We're 40 now. And one of the great, shocking at first, but great, things about that age is you begin to really, truly stop giving a fuck what other people think.

Besides, what else are we going to do?

[1] - https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/javascript-fatigue-48d4011b...

[2] - https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2...

[3] - http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

But that is only for the 'abstractions' they implement; the details are another thing.

I feel the only thing that really changed is that now big companies with PR / marketing departments are on the case while before it was more a geek thing. There is nothing fundamentally different in new frameworks (heck, most are them are just rehashes of others that are many years old with very small improvements), but suddenly the echo chamber makes it out to be vital to your career.

Like React. It's nice but come on... Every frontend programmer I know is fretting that they are not into it enough because you will die or something if you are not. That seems good marketing by Facebook to get such a solid drive behind it so quickly. But it's not needed for anything; you can still just use what you used before and often faster/better (because you are good at what you did for many years right?) and you don't have to bother with learning the latest thing all the time, while, with React, because you are drinking the cool aid, you have to update/refactor/redo stuff often because of changing libraries and new insights. It would make you stressed if think you feel you have to keep up with all of that.

Also, some tools seem to have just been made to look smart. Really, something like Webpack doesn't have to be that obfuscated. It really looks like it has been made like that just to say; 'ah, you just do not get it'. I see people (20somethings included) really sweating in their keyboard when trying to figure out more than the basics of that thing; so why are people using it? Why is it actually popular?

True in a certain intellectual sense. And in practical senses, also.

But unfortunately, the hiring market doesn't filter for "foundational knowledge"; in realistic terms, it largely hires for what might best be termed "keyword compliance" -- that is, baseline exposure to stuff that barely existed, or if it did, barely ticked most people's radar screens more than 5 years ago. And sometimes with even greatly shorter cutoffs than that. You know, stuff like Docker, React, Spark, etc.

That is, everyone says they're not out to hire dummies. But if you look at a lot of job ads -- a lot of people apparently just won't talk to you if you don't have a good number of "boxes" checked. Corresponding, in many cases, to stuff that wasn't even around 4 or more years ago. Very few (or so it appears) seem genuinely interested in hiring generalists with "strong foundational knowledge".

I know there are many counterexamples. But if you go by the stated proclamations companies make about who should bother sending a resume -- for a lot of them, it's not foundational knowledge that gets you to a screening call -- it's keyword soup.