Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

baldurbjarnason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#51

Post by drewcoo »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #9

I think the “full stack” trend is harmful. Yes it sounds nice in theory but there’s so many things to learn both in front and back end parts that I’m yet to meet a true “full stack web dev” even if they all claim to be. Yes a guy who’s done backend all his career can write some basic HTML and CSS and some JS. And some frontend guy can write a simple server side code that writes and reads from a datastore. But they’re…

> I think the “full stack” trend is harmful.

Please tell us why you think it's harmful. I don't see the harm in "too much to learn." That just sounds like software work to me.

When people specialize, the different specialties need to show their value, so they find greater complexity in their niche. The different specialties eventually independently "discover" many of the same concepts but explain them differently and their languages even diverge. I think losing the ability to share is a kind of harm.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#52

Post by isaacremuant »

anonzzzies wrote: post #16
isaacremuant wrote: post #4

Hard to sympathise. Generalizes like mad. Stop being a full stack. Have something you do well and you should have little problems in this industry. There's so much work an opportunities.

> There's so much work an opportunities. Many of them suck though. I get hired as a troubleshooter usually: that makes the most and it’s nice, get to see many companies etc. I work with people who are hired for frontend, backend etc; a month or so in, they will be asked things like ‘so devops, is that something you can do?’ Etc. And that is if it’s not in the actual job offer; ‘frontend expert wanted with 4000 years…

Well then you're not selling yourself well. Stop taking shit jobs. Brand yourself better.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#53

Post by cess11 »

mablopoule wrote: post #48
cess11 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't refer to capitalism. What in the article are you identifying as references to capitalism?

I do agree with the grandparent, I was a bit surprised too in the last paragraphs that the article's solution to frontend overengineering is to unionize. Though true, the articles doesn't go into 'capitalism = bad'.

That's not really what the article is about, it's a theme, but the argument is about power in the workplace and how it erodes the conditions for accumulating professional skill. It's like on the nose about this from the outset, I don't understand how you could miss it.

Since shareholders and management in large corporations control much of what software developers do all day, every day, if one considers this a problem and wants a solution, what can you think about except unions? I can think of one thing, guilds. Like the lawyers and doctors and accountants we could form guilds, only take in people we know are decent and honest and we kick them out if they turn bad or don't live up to our professional standards. And then we could use that as a base for collective bargaining, or if necessary, extortion.

If you don't have anything else, then I think union is likely the more practical suggestion. Many know what a union is, there's recent history of success, striking is well understood.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#54

Post by luke-stanley »

It starts off as articulate and then, I felt the arguments were less clear. It seems perhaps ungrounded. It's nice they have energy in a way but it also seems vaguely conspiratorial, rather than emergent. I've nothing against people seeking a better lot in life and collaborating or pointing out typical flaws and rent seeking. I wish the perspective was easier to follow, I'm curious.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#55

Post by anonzzzies »

isaacremuant wrote: post #52
anonzzzies wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much work an opportunities. Many of them suck though. I get hired as a troubleshooter usually: that makes the most and it’s nice, get to see many companies etc. I work with people who are hired for frontend, backend etc; a month or so in, they will be asked things like ‘so devops, is that something you can do?’ Etc. And that is if it’s not in the actual job offer; ‘frontend expert wanted with 4000 years…

Well then you're not selling yourself well. Stop taking shit jobs. Brand yourself better.

I have always just done exactly what I want; I just see people around me who get roped into crap.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#56

Post by err4nt »

threatofrain wrote: post #49
Havoc wrote: post #22

>CSS >HTML >JavaScript > in a sensible industry, would each be a dedicated field. I get that webdev is a maze of frameworks, but that's just ridiculous.

HTML has been stagnant for so long that as a document-oriented language... it doesn't even have a table of contents element! Or a bibliography!

HTML Custom Elements would allow you to define and provide support for your own element, so you could use it, and all browsers would understand it, and dev tools and CSS and JavaScript and all other HTML would work fine with it.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#57

Post by err4nt »

zx8080 wrote: post #20

A honest question. Could someone tell why is CSS getting more and more complex (other than Google and Co. want to protect their browser's market share and hold control of it)?

It's not getting more complex, because the easy stuff you have always been able to do is still there the exact same, as easy as it's always been. There is more of CSS now, so you have more power to express styles for more mediums in better ways, but you only need to use what you want so you don't need to make things complicated at all.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#58

Post by bdlowery »

bambax wrote: post #12

> Framework skills are perishable, but are easily just as complicated as the foundation layers of the web platform and it takes just as much – if not more – effort to keep them up to date. That's so true. For my own projects I try to not use any framework at all (or sometimes still use Backbone, which is entirely deprecated but simple, and that I know well enough). But of course, as an employee many times you don't h…

> I try not to use any framework at all

Aka “I like living in 1999”

Lol

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#59

Post by scruple »

ThalesX wrote: post #43
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #9

I think the “full stack” trend is harmful. Yes it sounds nice in theory but there’s so many things to learn both in front and back end parts that I’m yet to meet a true “full stack web dev” even if they all claim to be. Yes a guy who’s done backend all his career can write some basic HTML and CSS and some JS. And some frontend guy can write a simple server side code that writes and reads from a datastore. But they’re…

Like another commenter here, I've been full stack since my first working day, and to this day, 1.5 decades in the industry. I've always touched on infrastructure, on the database, on the server side and on the client side. Vertical implementations of features. I can't begin to imagine life as just a ... database guy, or a backend guy or just a frontend guy. Perhaps it needs to be aligned in everyone's eyes that we ca…

I was this person for the first ~17 years of my career. With the caveat that I was developing features on the bottom of the stack in C but would frequently implement features all the way up to a web interface running on an embedded device.

I'm in games now and I have a specific focus and I really, really enjoy it. Maybe it's my old brain, maybe it's because I have young kids now, I don't know, but I really like that I don't have to context switch so often now.

Re: The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

#60

Post by rrr_oh_man »

sgarland wrote: post #25
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #9

I think the “full stack” trend is harmful. Yes it sounds nice in theory but there’s so many things to learn both in front and back end parts that I’m yet to meet a true “full stack web dev” even if they all claim to be. Yes a guy who’s done backend all his career can write some basic HTML and CSS and some JS. And some frontend guy can write a simple server side code that writes and reads from a datastore. But they’re…

I have been saying this for years. The opinion has become even firmer since moving into DB specialization – the horror show of schemata and queries that even dedicated backend teams dream up is unreal. I don’t even really blame them; relational databases are hard . Yes, anyone can install Postgres (or spin up a managed service) and get decent results for quite some time, but at scale you absolutely have to know what…

> at scale you absolutely have to know what you’re doing

There's a lot of runway you hit that magic scale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39276069

Post reply on HN