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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

#241

Post by sirsinsalot »

scarface_74 wrote: post #234
sirsinsalot wrote: post #222

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?

You're generalising to win an argument.

The lead may know less than them about some things. That's OK for us. But what's important is they know more than the team about other things.

For example, we would rather have a lead that knows when to say "How do you know this is performant? Show me." and understands statistics and how to read perf dumps ... than how to profile whatever PHP script or whatever hands-on.

Sorry that contradicts the black-and-white world view you're holding.

I also strongly believe good technical leadership is about accepting you know _less_ than a team, and being able to ask the right technical questions to the right people who know more than you to ensure the best outcome.

You can do that with a ground knowledge of the stack, picked up on the job, along with learning the application's code and architecture. What a good technical lead brings is a deep understanding of how to manage complex people and systems by having done so across different languages/stacks/architectures many times.

Why would I turn away someone brilliant at that because they happen to know Java but not Android development? That's the easy bit to solve.

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

#242

Post by nailer »

1986 wrote: post #172
willio58 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I know a lot of React people that don’t know JS very well and far more that don’t know CSS basics.

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

#243

Post by bsder »

zigzag312 wrote: post #188
tjpnz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why this language exists. It just feels like a promotion vehicle by someone at Google who had enough clout to then get it shoehorned in to Flutter. If they had gone with JavaScript they could've made the switch to TypeScript later on. I realise this is being said with the benefit of hindsight but Flutter would be in a far better place today I suspect.

It compiles AOT to native code and supports tree shaking. It also has JIT mode with hot reloading/restarting. It has sound null safety and is statically typed. It's not a bad language. It just lacks some needed features. They'll probably get implemented over a span of a few years. Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop. It also has some baggage from it's early days when it was meant as JavaScript replac…

> Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop.

FFI continues to be a disaster (to be fair, this is not unique to Dart/Flutter).

The biggest problem with any cross-platform system on mobile is always getting performance out of the native interop. It's often easier to ship a computation to a server on the web and ship teh result back rather than execute it natively on another thread on the bloody phone. It's infuriating. We have a zillion cores, and every single phone OS tries it's damnedest to prevent you from using them because, heaven forbid, you might actually use up some of the battery. The Horror! The Horror!

The cross-platform systems for phones are really good at doing puzzle games or CRUD. Step outside of that and you enter "Here Be Dragons" territory very quickly.

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

#244

Post by harel »

The market is so weird right now, that I find it hard accepting this. A lot of jobs that would have been otherwise open are paused.

Having said that, I have just recently got into Flutter/Dart and I found the experience quite enjoyable and the resulting app very polished. From the tooling to the language itself and the Flutter framework - it's a joy.

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

#245

Post by lakomen »

scarface_74 wrote: post #32
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…

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…

> I can become an efficient Android developer “in a few days”.

I'll wager that you can't. Android development is Kotlin nowadays with Jetpack Compose.

Efficient, hardly. Not "in a few days"

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

#246

Post by fragmede »

scarface_74 wrote: post #218
fragmede wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to out myself and my level of skill, but it took me several days off and on just to wrap my head around the minutiae to get Apple signing for macOS and iOS to work just right. Learning the rest of the ecosystem came along eventually, but I think the real point is with a couple of days worth of intense study, I, and any other developer worth their salt, can bullshit your interview that requires a specific language…

Do your interviewers not ask you to talk through your real world experience?

Having sat on both sides of the table, the job of the one giving the interview is to suss out how much the candidate is full of hot air. The one being interviewed wants to put in the precise amount of hot air required to pass the interview and get to the offer stage. Talking through real world experiences, a candidate can prep and be able to pass despite not actually having had those experiences.

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

#247

Post by satvikpendem »

skybrian wrote: post #94
sgt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may lack things - true. But it's a pleasure to work in. I code quite a bit of Dart these days and the language never really holds you back. It flows quite easily. I use some code generation by having a build runner in the background.

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 use the packages flutter_hooks and functional_widget. They remove most of the boilerplate required for Flutter.

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

#248

Post by gjsman-1000 »

linuxftw wrote: post #132
scarface_74 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I would be a horrible hire to lead a team where I’m expected to mentor junior developers on best practices, which packages to use, how best to work with technical debt, etc. In the real world, I’m interviewing for positions where they are looking for leads at cloud consulting companies who can mentor juniors and that they can put in front of customers for recommendations, estimating statements of work for impleme…

How hard is it to find a few mainstream opensource projects and emulate what they're doing in a given language when it comes to packaging and best practices? Other than awful, unsuitable for production languages like ruby.

> Other than awful, unsuitable for production languages like ruby.

GitHub, Discourse, and Basecamp would like to have a few words with you.

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

#249

Post by scarface_74 »

fragmede wrote: post #246
scarface_74 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your interviewers not ask you to talk through your real world experience?

Having sat on both sides of the table, the job of the one giving the interview is to suss out how much the candidate is full of hot air. The one being interviewed wants to put in the precise amount of hot air required to pass the interview and get to the offer stage. Talking through real world experiences, a candidate can prep and be able to pass despite not actually having had those experiences.

At my last job I was officially a senior software engineer. But I was the de facto “cloud architect”. I was looking for someone to off load some of the cloud work too. I could tell someone who was faking it from a mile away. I am objectively very good at behavioral interviews (my next job at AWS ProServe was based passing a 5 round behavioral interview loop). The guy I eventually chose moved on to be an IT manager at the next company my CTO went to.

I can tell a paper tiger from someone who just went through ACloudGuru and memory enough to pass an exam.

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

#250

Post by sanderjd »

scarface_74 wrote: post #115
sanderjd wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all the "a few days" and "a week" stuff that generates these kinds of debate is a total red herring. Yes, it's hyperbole. But it's also true that people with experience successfully applying a bunch of different technologies are great hires onto a team using a technology they don't yet know. It's just a process measured in months rather than days. But if you need to hire someone because you have something tha…

And then it gets back to my other argument. Are you going to pay someone the same that doesn’t fit your technical needs as you would someone who does? If you pay them less, are your raise policies going to allow you to get them to market value once they do have the skillset or are they going to end up job hopping?

Personally, I would not take this into consideration when deciding how much to pay people.

I recognize that there are a lot of different niches in our industry, and presumably in some of those niches this narrow focus on what technology is being used makes sense, but that hasn't been my experience.

In my experience, you want people who are both pragmatic and flexible about learning, evaluating, choosing, and teaching others new tools.

I do recognize this may be a somewhat privileged view. I think I've been fortunate to spend my career in organizations where software is the profit center rather than a cost center supporting the rest of the business. My experience is that these companies have focused their hiring, compensation, and performance expectations on fundamentals and figure-it-out-itude rather than any specific technology stack.

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