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

281–290 of 308 posts

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

#281

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

>Most companies including the ones that created these cross platform frameworks, build thier core apps using native stack for a reason.

yes, because they are a company and have 2 separate teams maintaining each stack.

TBH I mostly blame Apple for my reluctance. Given the barrier of entry, I'd rather just work with a cross platform tool, launch android, and then figure out any potential IOS issues when I decide I need an IOS port and the need to pay for a license (and find/buy the Apple hardware).

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

#282

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

IDK about specific software, but I'd love to be a domain expert one day. Key is to grow in something that is always growing. Being "the Network guy" is a lot more promising than being "The Ruby guy".

At the same time, there is definitely some grandeur in top companies in being "the C++ guy". Or The COBOL guy: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~uoi/Jokes/Cobol.html

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

#283

Post by tester756 »

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 that's fastest way to high salaries.

And I'm saying this as somebody who worked across a lot of tech stack levels

from writing c# backends + even c# webassembly running in browser (high level), to some dekstop, to background workers / cli tools, to having my own OSS lib, to compilers (using llvm), to uefi / firmware C development.

Sure, it is interesting to work across all those levels, you get a lot of understanding how things are connected or you're just aware of how this work, but very often this is just shallow knowledge. Strong knowledge and experience requires time. If you switch, then you ain't gonna learn.

When trying to find a job there's almost never such a overlap which requires those.

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

#284

Post by fragmede »

scarface_74 wrote: post #249
fragmede wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How though? what are some of the tells?

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

#285

Post by jcelerier »

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…

I'm curious at the point you are trying to make - I don't know any of the three but Flutter looks by far the most obvious and easier to read and understand

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

#286

Post by SamuelAdams »

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.

One of my favourite articles on this topic, by patio11:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

> You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.

> Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.

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

#287

Post by bluefirebrand »

scarface_74 wrote: post #277
bluefirebrand wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wri…

> SQL is still SQL And you’re going to hit a brick wall at 100 mph thinking SQL is still SQL once you try to treat a columnar database like Redshift or Snowflake like you would a traditional database. That would be an expensive lesson to learn on the job. That’s just one example of trying to pattern match based on what you know when you hit a new to you technology. It’s like the old school operations people who study…

I've never actually used Redshift or Snowflake so I can't comment.

I will say that even moving from Postgres to MySql has a speed bump or two, so I completely agree.

Tech knowledge just isn't as interchangeable as hiring managers sometimes seem to think.

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

#289

Post by sph »

pragmatic wrote: post #193
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 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.

It is frightening to internalise that the entire job hunting circus depends on failed salespeople with no actual knowledge of the matter at hand.

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

#290

Post by mattdmrs »

gettodachoppa wrote: post #267
sirsinsalot wrote: post #162

It mistake misses the point of the investment. The pay-off is experience in new patterns, new tooling, new approaches. The dividend is in the job where you use the tool but the capital gain is in experience. When I hire for my team, I never mention the stack. I don't care. I am hiring software engineers, and what I value is mindset and ability. I'll throw you in at the deep end. Learn the language, libs, tooling, inf…

That sounds crazy to me. If you throw me at a new language, sure learning the language might only take a couple of weeks (if it doesn't radically depart from what I already know), but learning the libraries/ecosystem is at least 6 months. Probably more for something yuge like Java or .NET. I'll be referencing the doc and tinkering every little thing for many many months, which is sure to affect my productivity. Appen…

At our company, out of the 8 engineers I hired, only 2 had specific experience with our backend (Elixir) or frontend (Flutter) stack. I hired for apparence of talent, experience in some other equivalent stack and the right attitude towards learning.

All of them got productive rather quickly and had PRs shipping to prod in the same week, if not within a couple days.

I’m not saying it _will_ go as smoothly for anyone else, but if you have the right environment and pick the right people, as an employer you’re better off being flexible with experience.

Post reply on HN