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Comment by 0x3f | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I find the pigeonholing thing is just siloing and laziness. The last guy did our infra, nobody else wants to learn it, so the trivial thing to do is just hire on a tick-box basis.

I'm at a company now where one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch. Couldn't even be bothered to learn enough to hire for it. And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it.

Hate React if you want but come on guys, it's not a massively complex framework to learn the basics of.

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> one guy was the React guy. He left and everyone else was the snooty anti-React type and refused to learn. They ended up re-writing the whole thing from scratch.

React is close to an industry standard, sounds like bad management. Again, you don't have to know React to hire for React, just bring "smart and gets thing done" people onboard and trust them on their word that they can quickly learn anything they need to get it done. Clear responsibilities and goals, trust, swift consequences if that trust is breached.

Yes, I don't disagree. Well, it's a place where engineering has seized power through obstinance and used it to do whatever they find interesting or resume-positive. Luckily I'm just consulting here as a favor for an old friend.

> And the new framework is so niche it's now hard to hire for it.

Why do you need to specifically "hire for a framework"? Wouldn't any front-end developer be able to pick up any front-end framework (unless it's outside the javascript space entirely, and requires knowledge of purescript, rescript, elm, rust, clojure, scala, etc.)

I don't want to dox myself by getting too specific, but yes it's essentially a frontend framework for backend engineers in a niche lang (at least, niche for frontend). So they'd just hire more backend engineers in their language of choice.

I think this might actually be fine for internal tooling, but this is a customer-facing web app. It's now incredibly clunky and every feature takes an age to get out. Full page reloads for everything, etc.

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