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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

#231

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 recruiters. The person with one year of experience selling cellphones who now does the phone screen needs to see the exact tech listed on a resume or they pass.

Or they just edit your resume without your consent and confuse everyone in the interview. I’ve had that happen a few times.

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

#232
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…

>don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. This is such a funny mantra. Okay learn how nuclear fission works. Or EUV lithography. Or power transmission across superconductors. All of these are extant, commercial, technologies (yes even the last one). Too much? How about something more pedestrian like overhead cams and electric fuel injection? Too far afield? Okay learn how DMA works on…

As software developers we learn software technologies for breakfast, not entire industrial processes...

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

#233
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google can hire separate developers for each platform and pay them, investing millions of dollars into their mobile app. Can you afford to spend money developing same thing twice forever?

I worked for a midsized health care company a few years ago (around 300 people including customer service). They had three mobile developers who supported the iOS app and the Android app.

Similarly I worked at a 1000 person financial institution for years and represented 50% of the Android mobile developer division there.

Similarly there were 3 iOS devs.

The feature set was enormous but we did fine.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The team has a culture where the leads know less than they do and they are okay that?

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

#235
post #74

parsing JSON in Flutter seems like A LOT https://codewithandrea.com/articles/parse-json-dart/

If you really want to write it yourself, sure. This code is very easily automatically generated.

https://pub.dev/packages/json_serializable

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

#236
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what has prevented me from diving into Flutter for a personal project. Although it supports desktop and web, it is first and foremost a tool for building mobile applications. For desktop, too much of the API is built around the assumption that you are on a mobile device with a single window and a finger as the pointing device. Feature requests for desktop, such as proper support for mouse-based drag and drop…

What do you mean by mouse based drag and drop? As far as I can tell Draggable and DragTarget work fine on windows and macos at least.

The API assumes you are on a relatively small screen and using a finger to drag and drop. Thus, it doesn't provide functionality that you would expect if you were on a desktop or laptop monitor with more space and using a mouse and keyboard where there is a wider variety of things that you would like to happen with a drag and drop interface. The API is primarily assuming you're taking a widget and dragging it with a finger to somewhere just an inch or two away on a phone or tablet screen. Yes, drag and drop "works" on desktop as it is, but the API is not well-designed for desktop-based usage. A lot of ad-hoc type of behavior using global state has to be used.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve done this exact thing. Stop telling people how they’d act.

Stop telling me how I should stop telling people how they’d act!

I kid.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>don’t buy it. As software developers we learn technologies for breakfast. This is such a funny mantra. Okay learn how nuclear fission works. Or EUV lithography. Or power transmission across superconductors. All of these are extant, commercial, technologies (yes even the last one). Too much? How about something more pedestrian like overhead cams and electric fuel injection? Too far afield? Okay learn how DMA works on…

You're just arguing semantics. And the example given can go the other way: if your Ford motor plant closes and the only places hiring are software shops, you'd also be "fucked".

> You're just arguing semantics

I never have any clue what this retort means: when exactly are semantics (the meanings of things) not important?

> Ford motor plant closes and the only places hiring are software shops, you'd also be "fucked".

That's one hundred percent true but the difference is I don't see assembly plant workers going around claiming they learn technologies for breakfast (or lunch or dinner).

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The team has a culture where the leads know less than they do and they are okay that?

There is a persistent attitude that developers are interchangeable, that the tech matters less than the knowledge of how to apply tech to solve problems.

I think that for architecting systems that's probably true, but as technology becomes more specialized and ecosystems become more complex it's harder for individuals to pick up and run with.

Consider if someone has written lots of PHP and jQuery

Now tell them to write a NodeJS server, React Frontend using NextJS.

It's not just "Oh I need to pick up ExpressJS" anymore. It's a whole beast.

Yeah the fundamentals stay the same. REST is still REST, SQL is still SQL, but actually writing lines of code is still a key activity of the job which people familiar with the technology will be better at.

Personally I run into this any time I try and write C#. There's a massive undercurrent of stuff that I feel I don't understand about C# and I bounce off that ecosystem every time I try

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

#240
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? What’s your point?

Your choice of text editor is largely irrelevant to your job. Picking a legacy tech stack to work in is not.

I get that. I just don’t think that “hamstring” is a good word to describe it. It’s a personal preference.
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