21–29 of 29 posts
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoe…
Lets be honest: if you can copy and paste from w3 schools you can probably be a front end web developer.
Are you talking about building a 90s-style website or something like Figma?
The way things are going is bad, here are some example sites that I find particularly difficult to use:
- new reddit (old reddit is much, much better)
- parley (yes, the "free speech" twitter) has a terrible UI. it takes like a year to post a tweet and you wait like 30 seconds for some dynamic spinning progress dialog to go away
With that said I do see the appeal because there aren't many good desktop UI frameworks either. I've worked with Qt enough to know it's plenty frustrating. On the other hand, if it's so easy to make a portable web app, why do we have things like Electron that ship a browser with your web-app, aside from native experience? Wait, did I dare say: native experience, is valuable?
We are well past peak web app, we are even past peak mobile app. What even makes an app, an app? Is it that it's tailored to a smaller purpose than more general applications? Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not. Is it good software, yes. Is Vim an app? I don't think I'd call it that. How about 'cat'? Nah... Apps are tailored to a specific business purpose rather than a more general use case.
Apps are a fad, but good software tools are not a fad. Build good tools, don't build apps (unless you're paying the bills)
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoe…
No I’m not going to eat sleep and breathe development. It’s a job to me. I’m not going to work 40 hours a week in front of a screen and then come home and “contribute to open source.” I will read blogs and listen to podcasts for whatever area that I choose to specialize, but I’m not going to spend time actually investigating it outside of work. If you as an employer deem it important for your employees to keep up wit…
I do not hire developers, but I can imagine that with the lower barrier to entry for front end jobs in 2020, companies have a difficult time differentiating all the new grads/bootcampers/self taught developers. It's almost teetering towards the same conversation as the leetcode problem -- merely finding a way to cut the pool of candidates given the vast amount to begin with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you talking about building a 90s-style website or something like Figma?
I wish people would only build 90's style sites. The way things are going is bad, here are some example sites that I find particularly difficult to use: - new reddit (old reddit is much, much better) - parley (yes, the "free speech" twitter) has a terrible UI. it takes like a year to post a tweet and you wait like 30 seconds for some dynamic spinning progress dialog to go away The web was not invented as an applicati…
> Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not.
'App' is a shortening of 'Application' popularised by iOS.
The state of the art in UI Engineering, is everything that used to be done in C++, but on the web/cross-platform using a mixture of JavaScript and WebAssembly.
Anyway, my point is that you are shitting on front-end development, yet there are front-end engineers out there developing high-quality software, and it is difficult: it requires a lot more ability than just copy-pasting from W3 Schools.
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoe…
No I’m not going to eat sleep and breathe development. It’s a job to me. I’m not going to work 40 hours a week in front of a screen and then come home and “contribute to open source.” I will read blogs and listen to podcasts for whatever area that I choose to specialize, but I’m not going to spend time actually investigating it outside of work. If you as an employer deem it important for your employees to keep up wit…
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoe…
I used to think this way, but now I do front-end (mostly) interviews at a gigantic company and I don't give two shits about motivation. Can you write HTML, CSS, and Javascript effectively, manipulate the DOM, write styles, and dip into a Python/Java backend on a rare occasion? Hired. Most front-enders I interview can't even add, remove, or edit a div without a framework helping them bind an object to the DOM.
Or do you put them through your test only to have them use React as part of the day job?
This is already quite dated. Most of the content is geared towards the state of JS in 2013-2015.
Can you write a quick list of missing concepts ?
These techniques are obsolete & lead to fragile code especially when blended with newer concepts like native js imports, let and const.
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoe…
No I’m not going to eat sleep and breathe development. It’s a job to me. I’m not going to work 40 hours a week in front of a screen and then come home and “contribute to open source.” I will read blogs and listen to podcasts for whatever area that I choose to specialize, but I’m not going to spend time actually investigating it outside of work. If you as an employer deem it important for your employees to keep up wit…
Though I think it has more to do with the kind of developer I am and the kinds of developers I've enjoyed working with in the past than anything intrinsic about how much value they might be able to provide to the company.
Luckily for me, I've noticed that frontend developers (especially those who like to work for startups) tends to be a very self-selecting group that biases towards passion. Those who don't have at least some amount of passion for frontend development would probably very soon realize they'd be happier specializing in some other ecosystem and migrate away (as you yourself did).