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Comment by FuNe | Hacker News Reader

" Efficiency is not your friend when it comes to cognitive growth. In order to keep your brain making new connections and keeping them active, you need to keep moving on to another challenging activity as soon as you reach the point of mastery in the one you are engaging in. You want to be in a constant state of slight discomfort, struggling to barely achieve whatever it is you are trying to do " Then working in IT (aka being in a constant state of noob-ness) is making you ever smarter.

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I didn't know that all these new Javascript frameworks were making me smart.

So that's why webdevs are so smart!

Not necessarily smart but trained. Yes, many times I thought about the problems I am solving, and new things I learn from the last 20 something years since I am in love with IT world. There are times when the problems repeat but many times problems are different so my approach and solution is different. Also new tech waves keep me trained cause I want to stay up to date and I want to learn what the new tech is solving or improving.

You joke, but honestly all the web devs that learn a new framework annually will be pretty good at picking up new frameworks after five or ten years. Of course, most of the people who fret about the state of the javascript ecosystem are doing it needlessly from the sidelines and don't themselves ever learn any of the new stuff.

> will be pretty good at picking up new frameworks after five or ten years

..or however long until the concept in question becomes irrelevant..

Do your clients all have projects that shut down after a year then?

One of my clients has 2 projects in durandal that I've picked up. No-one uses it any more, the documentation sucks ass, there's sod all on SO, the original devs had only done data access pages, super easy, not the data editing pages, absolute nightmare, so you can't even copy what they did before.

It's a bloody nightmare to work in. Pages which would take me an hour or two in an older tech are taking me days in this half-baked SPA.

I'm not on the sidelines because I'm fretting mate, I'm on the sidelines because the messes left behind are a fucking nightmare for those afterwards and an absolute disgrace to the profession.

It feels like the framework switchers rip off their clients by giving them code in an untested tech, the code is almost instantly obsolete while claiming to be cutting edge, and then run away when the flaws in the new framework they've chosen becomes obvious and they can't handle it and the complexity is too much to deal with and they run off and start a new project in the latest koolaid tech, pretending it's not history repeating itself, ad nauseum.

Or perhaps, not everyone on the sideline is a Luddite and not everyone jumping from js framework to js framework each year has chronic ADHD that can't see a project through.

I'm skeptical that learning new things in the same domain will achieve meaningful cognitive growth. It feels like the Sudoku analogy in the OP except your are continuously tweaking the rules and symbols of the game. It's challenging, but it is sufficiently challenging ?

It would be interesting to study just how much variation there needs to be. If I've mastered the GNU Debugger and now I'm learning how to use Docker, does that count (it certainly feels that it does)?

Spot on!

> being in a constant state of noob-ness

This is pretty much euphoric for me. The best thing is to overcome obstacles by finally realizing how to reason about something new.

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