"There’s a huge section of the tech ecosystem that’s constantly told they’re not smart enough to be here and that their work doesn’t matter. I spent a decade hearing C was beyond mere mortals, that you must be a genius to go anyway near low-level code, or algorithms, or distributed systems. The inventor of Git is notorious for pushing this narrative! But the truth is, anyone with enough brains and patience to learn how to do any kind of computing is “smart enough” to learn things like this."
As someone who spent the first decade or so as an embedded software developer, I wanted to move into web based systems because its a "bigger world". I'm a couple of jobs into this bigger world now, and it just keeps getting bigger. I feel the need to keep my finger on the pulse of new tools and technologies, but I try to hold that in tension with the advice we get here to keep things simple, be pragmatic, don't adopt technologies or techniques just because google does. I've always fancied myself as a generalist, but this bigger world makes me feel a bit like Bilbo Baggins, "like butter spread over too much bread."
My point: I've been in both worlds and I feel more at sea working on internet based systems. I had more mastery over the embedded systems I worked on, than over the web based systems I work on now. So my experience is in support of the author's point that ...
"anyone with enough brains and patience to learn how to do any kind of computing is “smart enough” to learn things like this."
Moreover, I would suggest that the average full-stack web developer is probably over-qualified.
The thing with web-development is that you don’t actually have to follow the trends to be productive.
A few years ago I read an article on LinkedIn, about how a local development company he helped our neighbouring municipality switch from ASP Web-Forms to the first version of AngularJS and Web-API because it was a more modern tech that would make them future proof, especially in regards of hiring.
I laughed at it at the time, and sure enough, they’re in trouble now because AngularJS didn’t actually stick around for long enough for anyone to really learn it. Where as the newest versions of ASP .Net Core are actually being build in a format that is extremely similar to ASP web-forms.
I’d like to say that I don’t think you should actually use ASP web-forms if you can avoid it, because it is dated, but it still runs half the internet in my region of the world and it’ll probably continue to outlive a lot of trendy techs for the foreseeable future.
Our goal is that if something changes radically every few years, then it’s not really worth adopting to our generalist stack, because we can’t afford to waste resources re-learning React or Angular or X every two years.
Comments
"There’s a huge section of the tech ecosystem that’s constantly told they’re not smart enough to be here and that their work doesn’t matter. I spent a decade hearing C was beyond mere mortals, that you must be a genius to go anyway near low-level code, or algorithms, or distributed systems. The inventor of Git is notorious for pushing this narrative! But the truth is, anyone with enough brains and patience to learn how to do any kind of computing is “smart enough” to learn things like this."
As someone who spent the first decade or so as an embedded software developer, I wanted to move into web based systems because its a "bigger world". I'm a couple of jobs into this bigger world now, and it just keeps getting bigger. I feel the need to keep my finger on the pulse of new tools and technologies, but I try to hold that in tension with the advice we get here to keep things simple, be pragmatic, don't adopt technologies or techniques just because google does. I've always fancied myself as a generalist, but this bigger world makes me feel a bit like Bilbo Baggins, "like butter spread over too much bread."
My point: I've been in both worlds and I feel more at sea working on internet based systems. I had more mastery over the embedded systems I worked on, than over the web based systems I work on now. So my experience is in support of the author's point that ...
"anyone with enough brains and patience to learn how to do any kind of computing is “smart enough” to learn things like this."
Moreover, I would suggest that the average full-stack web developer is probably over-qualified.
The thing with web-development is that you don’t actually have to follow the trends to be productive.
A few years ago I read an article on LinkedIn, about how a local development company he helped our neighbouring municipality switch from ASP Web-Forms to the first version of AngularJS and Web-API because it was a more modern tech that would make them future proof, especially in regards of hiring.
I laughed at it at the time, and sure enough, they’re in trouble now because AngularJS didn’t actually stick around for long enough for anyone to really learn it. Where as the newest versions of ASP .Net Core are actually being build in a format that is extremely similar to ASP web-forms.
I’d like to say that I don’t think you should actually use ASP web-forms if you can avoid it, because it is dated, but it still runs half the internet in my region of the world and it’ll probably continue to outlive a lot of trendy techs for the foreseeable future.
Our goal is that if something changes radically every few years, then it’s not really worth adopting to our generalist stack, because we can’t afford to waste resources re-learning React or Angular or X every two years.