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Comment by Klaster_1 | Hacker News Reader

The author names "employability" as one of the reasons developers oppose new tools. Not the take I expect when I started the read, but after giving it a though, it's actually something I've been bothered by recently. Due to favorable circumstances, I didn't have to learn frameworks other than Angular. This obviously limits my career opportunities and I'd be totally OK picking up another tool. But will potential employers even consider my CV that doesn't mention React? Will they be willing to offer the same position level and give me time to learn their stack? I am not so sure about that.

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> But will potential employers even consider my CV that doesn't mention React? Will they be willing to offer the same position level and give me time to learn their stack?

Many companies who use React will not consider your CV. React is as fundamental as JavaScript itself so omitting it in a CV is red flag. And learning modern React ecosystem from the scratch is no easy undertaking even for experienced developer.

Considering future employability when choosing a tech stack is definitely a valid concern and it should be clear for everyone involved. Using unconventional technologies makes it harder to hire people, because many developers will afraid to hurt their CVs.

That’s because React was messed up when it was at iteration 16. Slightly harder to understand at 17. But 18 completely jumped the shark on being able to understand the thing.

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to modern JS (still mostly using jquery when having to do something browser-side), but

> And learning modern React ecosystem from the scratch is no easy undertaking even for experienced developer.

feels like a pretty strong statement to me.

I've seen a few snippets here and there of various JS frameworks over the years and they could be summed up as "reactive programming for browsers" - which doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking.

So I assume that I just don't know where the difficulty comes from. My question is then: where is the nonobvious complexity of learning React?

The main reason for the no-go is that you get hired by HR, not another developer. Many times the company has outsourced the hiring process to another company and that one has even less of a clue about programming. So they just read the keywords (or use an AI) to match you. No match, no interview.

Ofcourse you can pick up another stack much easier if you already know another. But that is not interesting if all you do is compare number of matches on the CV.

> learning modern React ecosystem from the scratch is no easy undertaking even for experienced developer.

Strong disagree on this. Modern Angular and Vue work almost identically to React. The details are different, but the principles the same. For an experienced dev, that knowledge should translate directly.

The ecosystem is also not that bit. React Router and some state management tools are the only React-specific libraries one really needs. The rest you can lookup.

The trickiest tooling in the JavaScript ecosystem has always been the build tooling, and that's largely shared across frameworks.

Good to know. I always wandered how difficult would it be to learn React as an Angular Developer.

> And learning modern React ecosystem from the scratch is no easy undertaking even for experienced developer.

I don't see a scenario where this is likely, other than if you're contributing directly to the react codebase.

> React is as fundamental as JavaScript itself

Wow, that's very delusional. React is very popular but can't be compared to JS. JS is THE scripting language of the web with backwards compatibility going back to 3 decades ago. You NEED JS if you want interactivity in your website. React is nowhere near there. React won't disappear but it is likely that at some point it will become the new jQuery (present in many websites, used sometimes and regularly maintained) and people will use simpler tech like svelte

They needed Angular 17/18, I worked with 16, after the initial call they didn't want to continue due to this. Not sure how real the job was. Apparently if you start with AngularJs, then 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, it will be impossible to upgrade to 18 /irony

Perhaps they had another reason to reject you which they didn't feel comfortable putting out in writing.

I guess the real reason was they thought that you couldn't hit the ground running but they didn't even try to see if that's true or not. I have changed projects in the same company before and they really wanted to know how fast can you become productive and anything beyond 2 weeks sounded too much and the they needed 2 months to create all my accounts and give me access.

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