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Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

Hell, I stopped carrying about new web frameworks when I was 25.

Genuine question, as someone who got exhausted and is out of the industry for the foreseeable future. How do you stay competitive or job hop when every post is looking for the latest web framework?

Don't choose hamster-wheel career tracks in the first place. Try to find Lindy paths [1], [2]. For example, SQL experts and DBAs. The rise and (mostly) demise of NoSQL actually cemented SQL's reputation as an irreplaceable technology. The latest Web framework is by definition non-Lindy: it's the new kid in town who think they know it all. grep is lindy, Unix is lindy, the qwerty keyboard is lindy, C++ is lindy, Computer Science is lindy, algorithms and data structures are lindy. Knowledge of the real world, whether it be finance or shipping, is lindy. Sorry, verbose reply, but I hope it helps.

1. https://luca-dellanna.com/lindy/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Interestingly, I've been thinking it would be a good idea to brush up on my C skills, because while there are serious contestants to its throne, a gig based on Rust today often means being at the cutting edge of tech, and will probably come with a lot of buzzwords like GraphQL, React, Typescript, monorepo, AWS Lambda, daily standups — things giving me symptoms of burnout just writing down.

Whereas a C gig today probably means embedded, or subsystem far away from the frontend churn. If I'm lucky they have unit tests. The Lindy path you were talking about.

The demise of NoSQL is greatly exaggerated. It's past it's hype cycle, and that's fine.

Many of us use it quietly, to do good work, and there is no need to crow to the world about what is happening under the hood.

My team was asked how we should store data that is variable in structure and depth. When I suggested using mongo and not trying stuff it into a SQL db, I was looked at like I had suggested blending my firstborn for margaritas. People seem to think that NoSQL is dead and was always a bad idea.

The NoSQL movement was absolutely acrid towards SQL. The blowback is justified, IMHO. "blending my firstborn for margaritas" is very colorful language, woah :-)

Plenty of IT jobs out there that have job security to last your entire career and don't shift to the new shiny every few years. Utilities are a good example. Lots of older tech and some newer stuff, but nothing experimental.

Ex: Maintain some SQL queries, upgrade to a new database version without bricking everything, write some scripts that get fired off at a scheduled time, knowledge of the industry you're serving, update some configuration files for the company website which won't change for another decade, read some log files, create some visualization displays for operations staff, install software on certain machines, manage the company's VPN stuff, configure Linux, do the paperwork...etc

All this stuff is more generic IT and less rockstar developer. It reliably pays the bills and isn't very flashy.

There are plenty of people in IT that write code every day, some that rarely write code, and some that basically never write code, but just manage the business side of it all (there is a lot of beauracracy in large organizations).

> How do you stay competitive or job hop when every post is looking for the latest web framework?

Pretty sure you can get a job in frontend dev if you know React, which is 10 years old.

Map territory distinction -- what they are looking for (strong engineers regardless of stack) and what the role is (a description of what you'll be doing) are two different things. Find your way to doing and articulating impactful projects that use technology to measurably create leverage and value for the business, and you will be fine. Of course, that can be easier said than done.

Stop looking for work in tech places. It may require you to take a pay cut and work in a place viewed as a cost center though.

I'm honestly thinking about just picking up c++ or something and turning my attention to embedded systems. I'm sure there's a wealth of old tech sitting around that needs to be maintained.

I'm in embedded, there's also cutting edge stuff to work on. The nice thing is you can be mostly detached from annoying web apis and frameworks and databases. The not so nice stuff is dealing with crappy vendors, using crappy tool chains, and spending a ton of time setting up automated builds. Sometimes I think about switching to true embedded (I do embedded Linux) but that tends to pay less

i have never cared about them

And I always despised them!

same, complexity for complexity's sake.

To be fair, some of those frameworks were compensating for JavaScript which had real issues as a quickly-becoming-popular language.

SPAs were an answer to cross platform and device issues, given the web browser was the best cross platform piece of software used by the largest population. It made sense to try that vs making native apps on all the different platforms.

The fundamental problem in the web space spawning all of these tools has always been JavaScript’s weaknesses though.

I was there friend. I didnt agree, but hey, I left and we to "apps" for 10 years...

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