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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

#81

Post by doix »

scarface_74 wrote: post #59
doix wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not iOS, but I'm fairly confident I could be productive in an Android codebase in a week. The only reason I don't think I could do iOS is because I'd need to use a OSX, and I think it would take me longer to become productive in OSX. It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating n…

> It also depends on what you mean by "productive", would I want to lead a team to create a new app from scratch? Probably not. Go into an existing app and start fixing bugs and creating new features? Sure. As someone with experience, are you actually applying for jobs where you would just be pulling stories off the board doing “feature work”? And let’s take your example. What’s the chance of me being productively ab…

> As someone with experience, are you actually applying for jobs where you would just be pulling stories off the board doing “feature work”?

I dislike the whole Agile stories/points/sprints thing, so probably not those jobs. But if you're asking if I'm applying to jobs where I write code, then yep! I love writing code and building things.

> And let’s take your example. What’s the chance of me being productively able to create a feature in a Typescript/React app seeing that I haven’t done front end work since 2015 and even then it was server side rendering with ASP.Net MVC and bootstrap.

I don't know what other experience you have, but probably. At my previous job, I got a bunch of silicon production test engineers, that spend most of their day writing VBA, "productive" in React within a week.

I setup the base of the application and sorted out the routing, state management and abstractions for dealing with our data. But they were writing views and features after a week pretty well. I had to point out some performance issues in code reviews but that was mainly it.

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

#82

Post by nailer »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #45
nailer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why sarcasm is needed. Go lost to Rust as the mainstream safe systems language, k8s is a meme for wasted engineering resources, obviously Dart/Dash failed in its intention to replace JavaScript (I don’t know what ‘Chrome APIs’ are).

Go lost to Rust. Citation?

Is one needed? Rust is in the Linux kernel, in the Windows kernel, and is used by the most active blockchain.

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

#84

Post by sanderjd »

scarface_74 wrote: post #35
demarq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, I feel I could be employed tomorrow in a language or stack that I haven’t even heard of and start being productive by the end of the week! I seriously think you owe it to yourself to practice learning something new every week. It often takes one afternoon to get a “taste” and small side project to get beyond that. Every programming language. Is literally just a template for instructions, and every technol…

So could you be a productive iOS/Android developer in a week with no previous experience?

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 that needs to get done this week, then you've already screwed up.

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

#85

Post by nailer »

invalidname wrote: post #56
sgt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're even keeping GWT alive somehow. That was a major mistake, though. I remember building a large GWT project and the compile times just started getting into multiple minutes. Debugging was hard.

They are not. It's a third party fork that's keeping it alive. It's dead because Google didn't put any resources into it and just threw it out to see if it sticks. Then didn't keep up with the capabilities of JavaScript frameworks and didn't release any proper templates.

Did gmail migrate off GWT?

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

#86

Post by invalidname »

nailer wrote: post #85
invalidname wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not. It's a third party fork that's keeping it alive. It's dead because Google didn't put any resources into it and just threw it out to see if it sticks. Then didn't keep up with the capabilities of JavaScript frameworks and didn't release any proper templates.

Did gmail migrate off GWT?

It never used GWT. They claimed GWT can be used to build apps like gmail and that was misleading. They didn't write it using GWT since it predated the existence of GWT.

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

#87

Post by sanderjd »

scarface_74 wrote: post #57
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that learning a new language -at a basic level- can be done quickly (like a couple of weeks , not days). But learning it at an advanced level, is a whole different matter. I've been writing Swift since, literally, a few hours after it was announced, in 2014. I write Swift every day (like, seven days a week), and have been, since that first day. I feel as if I have only had "mastery" of the language f…

I just said something similar in another reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099395 But as far as employees being an “investment” let’s look at things from the employee side. For context: these numbers I’m about to cite are correct to within a first approximation on the “enterprise dev” side where most of the 2.7 million developers work and in most major cities in the US that are not on the west coast or in…

> you’re not going to be able to pay them 35% more in two years because of HR policies

Seems like you just identified the issue. You're right, of course, that the "invest in employees" approach doesn't work at companies that have a corporate policy to not invest in employees.

Investing in employees is a top-down strategy, not a bottom-up one. If there isn't support for it at the top, then you're right, it won't work.

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

#89

Post by scarface_74 »

sanderjd wrote: post #87
scarface_74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just said something similar in another reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37099395 But as far as employees being an “investment” let’s look at things from the employee side. For context: these numbers I’m about to cite are correct to within a first approximation on the “enterprise dev” side where most of the 2.7 million developers work and in most major cities in the US that are not on the west coast or in…

> you’re not going to be able to pay them 35% more in two years because of HR policies Seems like you just identified the issue. You're right, of course, that the "invest in employees" approach doesn't work at companies that have a corporate policy to not invest in employees. Investing in employees is a top-down strategy, not a bottom-up one. If there isn't support for it at the top, then you're right, it won't work.

And it’s not just smaller companies - my experience of n=1 at BigTech companies is that to get ahead, it’s best to “boomerang”.

Besides even at BigTech, it’s much easier to get a higher level position at another comparable company than go through the promotion process.

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

#90

Post by dmix »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #80
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…

It's one thing knowing the language, it's another being productive with the ecosystem. One takes between a few days and a few months. The other is a few years, unless you get pro training. I guarantee most people starting with Python from another language will be productive quickly. But they will curse the packaging ecosystem because they will follow a lot of tutorials that don't follow this: https://bitecode.substac…

Yeah I learned Ruby on Rails very quickly a long time ago, it's probably one of the most accessible frameworks to learn, but it took me years to master all the weird quirks, dev environment stuff, debugging, production deployment etc. Plus from all the years doing it I'm familiar with all the old libraries so when you join a company with a large legacy code base, which at this point is very common for rails, I don't have to spend forever learning the details of some 7yr old implentation no one uses anymore.

Working with senior devs who have only been doing it for 1-2yrs is where you see the small productivity differences that aren't simply being a newbie programmer.

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