Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. Honestly at this point I'll take boring. I'd welcome boring. People really need to stop upgrading 0.1 second after something comes out. Take the Java world. You can have a lot of criticism for the language or the platform, but the reality is people get shit done without upgrading right away. It's not even part of the culture. This allows people to master the platform and tools.

In the JS world, there's no mastery. People just keep jumping to newest versions and spend all of their time fighting the new problems. Just. Stop.

The company I work for almost standardized on react/redux. We're not done getting rid of our old stack that people are already looking at Relay Modern, Apollo, MobX, etc. If it wasn't for our investment in a massive home grown React component library, there would probably be VueJS all over the place.

So we lose the ability to help each other. Every team is different, dealing with different problems. We can't build libraries since we don't have a platform to target. That to me makes us much weaker.

So I welcome boring. I welcome the day when people are no longer interested in it so they stop spamming npm to check if a new version of their favorite library is out to upgrade to it when the existing one is working fine.

Agreed - I've often thought that having to learn these new frameworks will ultimately lead to terminal juniority. I get that each framework does things differently, and you can learn new patterns from each one, but ultimately you're just re-learning the wheel. Not advancing your skillset.

>In the JS world, there's no mastery. People just keep jumping to newest versions and spend all of their time fighting the new problems. Just. Stop.

The frontend framework we use has had six major releases in a year and a half. And I am talking, rip the guts out and change how it works major releases (How semantic versioning is supposed to work).

Like I appreciate that they are doing active development and making it better (because it is getting better, to be honest), but I still feel like you could fix bugs in some minor versions and do like cut major releases to like every six months at least.

The issue is leadership. If someone high enough forces standardization, then you are good to go. Just like the old days of only being an 'X' language shop and using only 'Y' framework.

I think the irony is that all the freedom I used to see frontend people using is coming back to bite them and their mindset is slowly moving towards what backend people have been doing for a long time.

The issue is leadership, you're right. But it's not leadership at an individual company level. It's at a community level.

Right now, if you're in a tech hub and you tell FE people "Sorry, we're standardizing on <thing from last year> and we're gonna hold off on major release upgrades without a good reason", you're gonna lose some people and have trouble hiring or deal with constant internal complains. Why? Because their buddies in <other company across the street> aren't dealing with that restriction.

You need some serious charisma to tell people you're sticking with last year's tech and get away with it. If you're in an environment where you can do that AND still hire fast enough to grow, consider yourself lucky and hope your boss never quits :)

True. In the Midwest I guess we are a little more conservative. I have hit the latest and greatest fatigue and am happy to stabilize on something for day to day work. If I want to try something new, I can start a side project.

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