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Comment by temporallobe | Hacker News Reader

My niche is pure JS widgets. That’s 100% Vanilla JS (old or new). No libraries or frameworks. I can create self-contained, state-aware, datastore driven (using session/application storage) interactive mini-applications, tools, widgets, and even games — often with just ONE JS file (CSS and HTML embedded), and fancier apps using maybe just a few supporting resource files. In fact, I am the only dev in my entire project of 100+ devs that has this skill and maintain quite a few of these widgets that I primarily authored. Thus is good and bad. Bad because it means I am stuck with these (and similar maintenance) forever and often get passed up for the newer stuff, but good because I’m almost irreplaceable.

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This sounds rather selfish to me. What if you ever quit your job and your team mates are suddenly expected to pick up the things you left behind? Why not share your knowledge with them and work together as a team.

I disagree that it’s selfish. I am always willing to share my knowledge, and have on many occasions, but most developers I’ve worked with don’t have much interest in that particular skillset.

If I quit my job, it is leadership/management’s responsibility to find a replacement; It’s also their responsibility to encourage knowledge sharing, cross-training, and have resource redundancy within the project.

In these situations, the team is generally actively avoiding that skillset. When GP leaves, they will happily rewrite all the widgets to use the current hottest framework and turn a blind eye to the greatly increased hardware requirements / performance degradation.

There is a high probability that your coworkers secretly hate you.

Kudos to them if it's secret. This isn't how development should work, ever.

Edit: It all makes so much sense now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31226278

I like to program kind of like that also since it's easier to me than using frameworks usually. But why are you "irreplaceable"? I mean, people can't understand JavaScript and normal HTML unless everything is in a React project or something?

I find that to become more and more the case. Even looking up things as simple as "What HTML5 element should I use for this?" or "Do I really need any JS for that?" are too much, it seems. People got a hammer (their trendy framework of the month) and everything looks like a nail, to be punched in using the framework. In its extreme, the reliance on the framework goes as far as wanting to make everything a SPA.

I have found that there are a decreasing number of devs that understand core JS/HTML/CSS because of all the abstraction from the myriad of frameworks.

Another good thing about it is, that you are able to shave off heaps of overhead, if you do it right.

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