Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 308 posts

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#171

Post by scarface_74 »

wrayjustin wrote: post #151
scarface_74 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because I know Java (hypothetically I haven’t touched Java since two years after it was introduced) I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”. Better yet, since I did Windows CE development for ruggedized devices using C# Compact framework back between 2007-2010, I should have no problem picking up iOS development “in a few days” and start being a productive member of a team right? Or better yet…

Your hyperbolic comment is not far from reality when applied correctly. I've long said, and would stand by: Programming/Development is logic; learn logic. Languages are just syntax; if you understand logic, you _can_ learn the syntax. Taking concepts from one language to another shouldn't be an onerous task. Of course, none of that means you'll get that _senior_ language -focused position, or any particular position…

The first language I used professionally was C and I programmed console apps on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes. All I really needed to know was standard C.

Guess how long the learning curve was at my next job where I had the learn the intricacies of Win32/MFC, COM and DCOM, when to use which of the 8 different methods that Microsoft had of defining a string and how to safely convert between them, why my C++/ATL COM object kept crashing the other developers VB apps because I wasn’t doing reference counters correctly…

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#172

Post by 1986 »

willio58 wrote: post #160
jstx1 wrote: post #125

The mistake isn't investing time into Flutter; it's being "the Flutter guy", only knowing Flutter and only searching for Flutter jobs.

Same could be said about “the react guy”, which I definitely have been in the past. Of course react has buy-in 10x what flutter ever had but still.

You need to know JS to be a React guy though and that's easily transferable to another JS framework or other frontend work, where is Dart used other than Flutter?

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#174

Post by scarface_74 »

linuxftw wrote: post #157
scarface_74 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I don’t have any experience that is relevant to most of the 2.7 million developers. But I’m sure about my opinions”

Right. You have experience doing what everyone else does, aka, replaceable.

Everyone is replaceable. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow your company will have an open req for your position before your body gets cold.

They will send your next of kin “thoughts and prayers” and you will soon only be remembered when someone sees your name while doing a “git blame”

A less morbid example, what I call the “are you replaceable test”. Can you can hit on your boss’s spouse repeatedly at the Christmas party and have a job the next year?

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#175

Post by moron4hire »

listenallyall wrote: post #91
sanderjd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, yeah, I would have no trouble hiring you for any of those things, based on your experiences. I wouldn't have expectations that you'd be the most productive member of those teams "in a few days", but a few months, sure. And I would expect your wisdom from working on a bunch of different things to be a lot more impactful than whatever fine grained details you don't yet know of the exact technology we're usi…

You're saying that in isolation. If you have 50 other resumes on your desk for a React job, there's no way you're going to choose the guy who hasn't touched front-end since 2012.

That's not been my experience with hiring. My experience has been that 9 out of 10 resumes that cross my desk have almost no relevant job experience at all.

I'd love to have someone apply to a .NET desktop app position with 5 years of solid experience building Java web services. I'd love to fill a Node.js web service position with at least someone who spent 10 years writing embedded C for home automation devices. Hell, I'll take a brand new CS grad who built a janky Unity3D app in their spare time, not because it was a school project, but because they just wanted to.

What I get is IT network technicians who took a programming certification, substitute teachers who 15 years ago did software QA testing, public policy majors who dabbled with Matlab or Python in grad school, boot camp grads who haven't touched programming again since they finished their 8 week course 10 months ago. People who have never had any experience with the care and feeding of any kind of software project that other people had to work with them on for any significant time.

I'll get 1 resume out of the batch (and they always come in groups of 10) that is just a software developer: for whatever N years of experience, at least the most recent .8N has been software. Then it comes down to figuring out if they were actually a contributing member or spent most of their time hiding in a large team.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#176

Post by nailer »

chairhairair wrote: post #110
nailer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is one needed? Rust is in the Linux kernel, in the Windows kernel, and is used by the most active blockchain.

Those are some true measures of success right there.

Yes, those are incredibly important projects.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#177

Post by sgt »

pzo wrote: post #130
skybrian wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering how you deal with the pile of constructor calls needed to construct views in Flutter? Deeply nested expressions remind me of Lisp. JSX is conceptually the same but somehow seems easier to read. Maybe it's the close tags?

I'm wondering about this as well, actually this weekend been doing Flutter 'Test Drive' of their tutorial and experience was not that great. I'm still forcing my brain to parse this complex structure with very simple widget structure from their samples. Its Flutter: ``` class MyHomePage extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { var appState = context.watch (); var pair = appState.curren…

With the help of the IDE (Android Studio is what I use for Flutter development) it is actually pretty OK. It's easy to use keyboard shortcuts to see / explore function parameters and so on. I also indent regularly so I can easily undo if something is clearly out of whack.

That said, SwiftUI is clearly the supreme leader in this declarative approach.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#178

Post by sgt »

invalidname wrote: post #86
nailer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did gmail migrate off GWT?

It never used GWT. They claimed GWT can be used to build apps like gmail and that was misleading. They didn't write it using GWT since it predated the existence of GWT.

When I checked 2-3 years ago, Google Cloud portal was based on GWT.

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#179

Post by scarface_74 »

doix wrote: post #168
pjmlp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that has done on and off Android programming as hobby since NDK was introduced in Android 2.2, and regularly follows ADB Podcast, I doubt it. Every Android version is basically a reboot in many parts of the framework, the device fragmentation is hardly any better than J2ME days, several features are only documented via samples or Google IO talks, Gradle plugins require rewrites between upgrades, and each A…

I think it really depends on what your definition of "productive" is. Let me try and quantify it. I looked through my apps that I installed from F-Droid, then looked at their GitHub issues and picked one [0]. I bet I could implement that in less than a week with 0 Android development experience. > Every Android version is basically a reboot in many parts of the framework, the device fragmentation is hardly any better…

Are you trying to find a job as a journeyman developer (nothing wrong with that) or are you trying to lead a team or be a senior where you are expected to be productive from day one and maybe mentor developers and be more strategic?

Would you hire me someone who not only doesn’t know anything about Android development but doesn’t even follow the ecosystem and the current trends?

Re: I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

#180

Post by dcchambers »

Why are people so obsessed with hyper specializing in software development? Labeling yourself a react dev or rails dev or flutter dev or whatever is only going to limit your growth and options. Your career will outlive many tech stacks. Tech changes quickly. Never stop learning.
Post reply on HN