51–60 of 308 posts
The mistake is believing that you can ever stop learning. 20 years I'm doing this professionally, 20 years I'm learning.
Are mobile stacks so specialised that it's difficult to switch between them? Out of curiosity, how long would it take a flutter dev to become productive in some other stack?
Maybe I’m special (and it was 6-10 years ago), but after becoming proficient and pretty deep in osx/ios development I took an android project and it wasn’t obvious AT ALL. If it were a new job and not a project pushed to me at the same position I had, pretty sure it would be difficult to keep it. Of course that depends on average expectations. Some people may learn and do and relax and still outperform if these are l…
From what I understand modern Android has become much more pleasant to develop for.
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Absolutely, I feel I could be employed tomorrow in a language or stack that I haven’t even heard of and start being productive by the end of the week! I seriously think you owe it to yourself to practice learning something new every week. It often takes one afternoon to get a “taste” and small side project to get beyond that. Every programming language. Is literally just a template for instructions, and every technol…
So could you be a productive iOS/Android developer in a week with no previous experience?
The only reason I don't think I could do iOS is because I'd need to use a OSX, and I think it would take me longer to become productive in OSX.
It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating new features? Sure.
I did a trial week before joining my current gig full-time. I had pretty much no typescript experience, came into a large TS react/nodejs app and had a pull request on the 2nd day for a new feature.
I wouldn't try to work on a Haskell or OCaml codebase, they are different enough that I'm not confident I could pick them up quickly. But most mainstream languages are similar enough that it really shouldn't be that hard to pick them up and be productive.
I don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. We learn them, and then we forget them. We recollect the wisdom gained and apply it in our next gig using a different technology. It works for mobile development, for frontend, for backend, for infra, for almost anything. I have worked for years with PHP, Apache, Ansible and MySQL. Nowadays not anymore. And in 7 years I’ll be using something…
You could say this about any Google technology.
I know right? Just like Golang, Kubernetes, Chrome APIs, etc /s
Android is also terrible. As an Android developer it's the absolute worst when compared to iOS development. Google is an Ad company, everything else it does is a hobby.
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I know right? Just like Golang, Kubernetes, Chrome APIs, etc /s
They're even keeping GWT alive somehow. That was a major mistake, though. I remember building a large GWT project and the compile times just started getting into multiple minutes. Debugging was hard.
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So could you be a productive iOS/Android developer in a week with no previous experience?
My experience is that learning a new language -at a basic level- can be done quickly (like a couple of weeks , not days). But learning it at an advanced level, is a whole different matter. I've been writing Swift since, literally, a few hours after it was announced, in 2014. I write Swift every day (like, seven days a week), and have been, since that first day. I feel as if I have only had "mastery" of the language f…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099395
But as far as employees being an “investment” let’s look at things from the employee side.
For context: these numbers I’m about to cite are correct to within a first approximation on the “enterprise dev” side where most of the 2.7 million developers work and in most major cities in the US that are not on the west coast or in NYC
Let’s say you hire a Junior/mid level developer and offer them $100K which is fair knowing they are going to do “negative work” for the first few months as an investment. Two years later, they have experience and now can apply for companies that are looking for experienced iOS developers. Their market rate shot up to $135k.
Because of salary compression and inversion, you’re not going to be able to pay them 35% more in two years because of HR policies. Yet you can bring in new experienced iOS developers at market rate. If he’s smart your employee is going to jump ship, wasting a lot of your “investment”.
As a hiring manager, knowing that statistically I’m only going to get two years out of an employee, why wouldn’t I just poach the person you just trained and pay them the $135K you couldn’t?
Another scenario is that now that developer has been reading r/cscareerquestions and decided to “grind leetcode and work for a FAANG”. Now he’s looking at $200K+ as a mid level developer adding yet more bloat to the Facebook app.
You couldn’t compete with that if you wanted to.
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As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.
Is that actually true though? Most major Google apps predate Flutter. I was under the impression that a lot of their apps are either custom web view wrappers or native with shared C++ code for business logic. Stadia and Google Pay are the only consumer facing Google apps I’m aware of that are made with Flutter.
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So could you be a productive iOS/Android developer in a week with no previous experience?
Not iOS, but I'm fairly confident I could be productive in an Android codebase in a week. The only reason I don't think I could do iOS is because I'd need to use a OSX, and I think it would take me longer to become productive in OSX. It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating n…
As someone with experience, are you actually applying for jobs where you would just be pulling stories off the board doing “feature work”?
And let’s take your example. What’s the chance of me being productively able to create a feature in a Typescript/React app seeing that I haven’t done front end work since 2015 and even then it was server side rendering with ASP.Net MVC and bootstrap.
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As long as you don’t include in that number - most apps built by Google.
Is that actually true though? Most major Google apps predate Flutter. I was under the impression that a lot of their apps are either custom web view wrappers or native with shared C++ code for business logic. Stadia and Google Pay are the only consumer facing Google apps I’m aware of that are made with Flutter.