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I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter

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

#221

Post by coffeebeqn »

o_m wrote: post #114
tkiolp4 wrote: post #15

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…

Everyone goes through this once. A lot of your knowledge suddenly aren't needed anymore because of external factors. For me it was Flash. I've seen colleges being afraid of learning new technology after being burned once. Now my skills are learning new skills.

I also did Flash for a long time. 10 years later it’s not like that experience is mostly lost. When I write typescript I get a dejavú to AS3. Plus knowledge of VMs, garbage collection and all the other programming concepts translates to most languages

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

#222

Post by sirsinsalot »

scarface_74 wrote: post #202
sirsinsalot wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about them? I'm looking for someone who has lead a team, solved that level of problems, has good soft skills and leadership. The language or stack is irrelevant. A good lead knows the right questions to ask, understands they don't have all the answers and plays to their own and the teams strength. Honestly the last thing I care about, especially here, is if they know the stack.

And the other part of “leading the team” is being able to mentor juniors and help them technically. What good is a lead if they can’t answer technical questions and can’t help other developers with technical guidance? What will it do for team morale on your iOS team when they know you bought in a “lead” who couldn’t actually help them with the tough technical problems?

The team has a culture that knows full well someone is brought in for who they are ... what they know might need some catch up.

I'm not saying this is right in all circumstances. I wouldn't do this with, for example, realtime embedded.

For what I operate in, fairly bland web applications and stacks.

It works fine, exceptions excepted.

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

#223

Post by coffeebeqn »

the_only_law wrote: post #198
dcchambers wrote: post #180

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.

Because once the market goes belly up, being a generalist seems to be a death sentence. One thing I noticed having been on the job search for about a year now, is the amount of jobs looking for a specialist, whether that be in a particular domain, or technology. Often very obscure or “obsolete” stuff. I remember applying to a government job, and in their little checklist application, one of the questions was basicall…

We must be looking at different levels or roles or something. Most job postings I see say something like Must have experience in “x, y, z or other modern language”. Maybe extreme specialization is more common in front end ?

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

#224

Post by the_only_law »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #223
the_only_law wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because once the market goes belly up, being a generalist seems to be a death sentence. One thing I noticed having been on the job search for about a year now, is the amount of jobs looking for a specialist, whether that be in a particular domain, or technology. Often very obscure or “obsolete” stuff. I remember applying to a government job, and in their little checklist application, one of the questions was basicall…

We must be looking at different levels or roles or something. Most job postings I see say something like Must have experience in “x, y, z or other modern language”. Maybe extreme specialization is more common in front end ?

I’ve seen roles like that as well, but much less than I used to. I see them more on entry level roles. I’ve never worked frontend and I’ve barely been full stack for several years now. Most of my experience is in .NET stuff, and usually C# is not the “ “x, y, or z”. Usually it’s something along the lines of “Java, Go, Python”. Not that I haven’t ever worked in those languages, but certainly not recently.

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

#225

Post by demarq »

scarface_74 wrote: post #35
demarq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Clearly you read my response and felt some doubt

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

#226

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Already with that response you have proved not to understand the Android ecosystem.

No it doesn't have an amazing backwards compatibility, specially depending on what is cool in one Google IO, and already legacy in the new one, without replacement, like e.g. Tango, Sceneform, Fragments.

There are policy rules how old an Android app is allowed to be in Play Store.

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

#227

Post by the_only_law »

Barrin92 wrote: post #67
0x445442 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mistake OP is referring to is spending too much time learning the wrong thing which is easy to do in the Cargo Cult that is modern Software Development.

There isn't really anything to Flutter that stands out as so unique it wouldn't translate. Dart is not opinionated, sort of as if you threw every Algol family language into a blender, and the component/reactive style is just like any other modern framework. it's arguably one of the strengths of Flutter, regardless of where you come from there's nothing esoteric to it, so it's not like you learn the wrong thing. Learn…

> Learning Programming isn't about memorizing APIs or libraries

Maybe not, but interviewing often is.

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

#228

Post by MrDresden »

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.

It has been interesting seeing how many interviewees coming in for a mobile app developer positions in the last 4-5 years have made bold claims about native development (Obj-C/Swift/Kotlin/Java) being dead due to Flutter, then fumbling completely when asked to solve problems that would require them to drop 'down' into the native environment.

Having Flutter in the toolbox is quite a good thing, unless there is nothing else in there. Then you are in trouble.

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

#229

Post by the_only_law »

nailer wrote: post #33
rvz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right? Just like Golang, Kubernetes, Chrome APIs, etc /s

I’m not sure why sarcasm is needed. Go lost to Rust as the mainstream safe systems language, k8s is a meme for wasted engineering resources, obviously Dart/Dash failed in its intention to replace JavaScript (I don’t know what ‘Chrome APIs’ are).

Despite ostensibly being a “systems language”. I see Go used more often for writing CRUD apps or APIs. There’s a lot more work in that then working in rust, thought I’ve admittedly been surprised with the amount of rust jobs I’ve seen.

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

#230

Post by MrDresden »

m_fayer wrote: post #129
suyash wrote: post #75

For anyone reading this and if you want to develop mobile apps, just first learn native iOS/Android platforms, they are not going anywhere before you get tempted by other flashy technologies like Flutter or React Native. Most companies including the ones that created these cross platform frameworks, build thier core apps using native stack for a reason.

I used to say just this. And I did native Android dev for many years, but I gave it up around 2019. When I finally checked out, native Android was a teetering mess of compatibility libraries, half-baked never-finished “new ways of doing things”, lacking docs, forever-bugs, and overall neglect. Simple ui would take you 5x as long as equivalent css and have you dropping down to low level drawing in frustration. Back th…

You truly picked a bad time to move away. The sheer quantity of chance that has happened since EOY 2019 is staggering.

I say this as someone who has mostly done Android dev since '09.

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