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Comment by _the_inflator | Hacker News Reader

One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation.

I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation.

How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard?

What blogs/authoers do you follow? Do you work on Open Source or private projects in your spare time? What is the current version of ECMA, Framework etc. and when does the next come out? Name 3 of the last things you learned this year as a developer.

These questions really make enthusiasts shine. If I had to choose motivation over knowledge, I would always opt for highly enthusiastic people over knowledge people. Former will easily surpass the later.

Besides that I like this idea. Very good!

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No I’m not going to eat sleep and breathe development. It’s a job to me. I’m not going to work 40 hours a week in front of a screen and then come home and “contribute to open source.”

I will read blogs and listen to podcasts for whatever area that I choose to specialize, but I’m not going to spend time actually investigating it outside of work.

If you as an employer deem it important for your employees to keep up with the latest trends and contribute to open source, allocate some time during the day.

But, I guess this is also the reason I abandoned the clusterf%%% of modern front end development almost 10 years ago and just try to stay somewhat current with JS.

I definitely agree with this sentiment. However, if there is any development job where enthusiasm would be of a benefit, I would think the front end is a good candidate. I imagine it also depends on the culture of the workplace, too. Some may favor the "trends" that are associated with the web, while others may just want somebody as you describe.

I do not hire developers, but I can imagine that with the lower barrier to entry for front end jobs in 2020, companies have a difficult time differentiating all the new grads/bootcampers/self taught developers. It's almost teetering towards the same conversation as the leetcode problem -- merely finding a way to cut the pool of candidates given the vast amount to begin with.

not mutually exclusive! a hard worked and productive 8 hours is rare as it is.

That's fine, but FWIW if I had to strictly choose between the two, I too would also optimize for passion over expertise (of course it's never a binary choice in the real world).

Though I think it has more to do with the kind of developer I am and the kinds of developers I've enjoyed working with in the past than anything intrinsic about how much value they might be able to provide to the company.

Luckily for me, I've noticed that frontend developers (especially those who like to work for startups) tends to be a very self-selecting group that biases towards passion. Those who don't have at least some amount of passion for frontend development would probably very soon realize they'd be happier specializing in some other ecosystem and migrate away (as you yourself did).

> I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation.

I'm sorry but enthusiasm and motivation can die pretty quickly. I mean I am just a contractor but when I see my manager hit a wall trying to do basic things like getting another co-worker's computer unlocked too a whole day of fighting IT and getting another 8 GB of RAM for our desktops which had 8GB RAM took well over four months, our request for SSD instead of 5400 rpm hard disk couldn't be accepted because the company has a contract with HP and is only allowed to buy from HP, and when IT changes a configuration that brings down your internal website application, it takes for plus hours of emails back and forth for them to revert their change of the config file, the enthusiasm and motivation will eventually die.

It is still possible to stay motivated. For example, I play with some web stuff in my spare time but I doubt it is possible to stay motivated at work for any length of time.

I used to think this way, but now I do front-end (mostly) interviews at a gigantic company and I don't give two shits about motivation. Can you write HTML, CSS, and Javascript effectively, manipulate the DOM, write styles, and dip into a Python/Java backend on a rare occasion? Hired.

Most front-enders I interview can't even add, remove, or edit a div without a framework helping them bind an object to the DOM.

Does your gigantic company require your frontenders to add/remove/edit a div without a framework though?

Or do you put them through your test only to have them use React as part of the day job?

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