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This is also the reason many companies rewrite code to new framework because they cannot find developers that know how to program in the old framework. Really narrow-minded if you ask me. You just need a good programmer than can easily learn new languages/frameworks. It might take a good programmer a week to learn a new language/framework.

I got my current job because I was able to learn a new framework overnight

An old job of mine put new employees through two months of bootcamp. The first month was mostly learning the industry idiosyncrasies and the second was role-specific training on the tech stack.

Understandably, this only works at large and established corporations who have enough spare revenue to invest in a dedicated training team.

For an experienced programmer with some frontend experience it only takes a couple of days of studying to learn React well enough to pass an interview. It really isn’t very complicated.

Something like CSS would be much harder to fake.

The problem isn’t Reacts API. It’s the absurd extreme declarative beginner mindset and code style you will be evaluated against. If you have any real experience without React you have to really lie about who you are.

> extreme declarative beginner mindset

What do you mean by this?

Perhaps they are referring to the fact that unfortunately many “React programmers” don’t have much experience of programming in other contexts, and fall into classic beginner programmer traps of overengineering, overabstraction, etc. It’s similar to the “jquery programmers” of yore.

This style of react can be pretty weird to “normal” programmers, intolerable even.

Fortunately there are many full stack programmers writing sensible react, I have worked on such teams and had no problems.

Learn React on your own, put React on your resume, don't claim mastery over it but a vague 'know' or 'learned'. What's to lie about? But sure, it might look better in a professional context instead of just being in the keyword soup. Add at your present place a blurb: 'worked on migrating frontend to React'. You can make this true enough by simply talking to your boss "Hey, why don't we move [our native UI/command line/custom JS] to React?" and getting a "No." If it comes up in an interview, you didn't get very far and it wasn't completed. Your lack of expertise may show up in a test of ability, but then again it may not, interviews are about both sides resolving what's true enough about the resumes and the job description/requirements into what they actually care about.

And of course if you tried making a short demo as part of the learning, you can show that to the boss/the UI team, and be able to tell more in React terms how (not) far it got, though your current boss might also say "Ok" and now you have a chance to learn it more professionally. Like, that's how a lot of us learn new things -- I wanted to learn property testing, fortunately I didn't have to ask any managers (just a legal/security workflow and pom changes signed off by another team member) to add Java's QuickTheories to my team's test code. After that I used it in a few places, did a casual lunch-and-learn demo on it for the team, used it in various other places over time. I'd put property testing on my resume if a job app needed it, and just be honest that I haven't written nearly as many property tests as unit tests. It's a mindset change to write them, too, and maybe my lack of years and years and thousands of tests would be clear to someone needing such deep expertise. Or not.

> If someone were to ask me to sit down and write something in React/Vue.js/whatever on the first interview, I don't think I could without the docs or a tutorial available

I've been in the web development doing all "ends" since I-lost-count-how-many years and even with a library which has rather a small API surface like React, I also need to search things every once in a while. If they don't allow you to do that in an interview, they have unrealistic expectations.

> I could pick up Django within two weeks if you hired me. I know what it is and what MV(C) is. Isn't that enough?

Most of the time, it is enough. There is also an unlikely chance that they have a lot of complexity and need someone who knows the internals and can fix obscure bugs. That probably wouldn't be you for Django/React. I sometimes was that person in the past and it's very stressful so, it's not something a developer would seek to become anyway.

I guess their point is "why don't you go ahead and learn django in 2 weeks, sacrifice a few weekends and nights so you can blow away the easy pitches we're tossing at you during the interview". Pick a web framework and learn it and then you at least have a basis for your claims.