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Comment by yukichan | Hacker News Reader

Experience is a liability. You learn all kinds of things as an engineer that quickly become obsolete. Even in the web environment. If you're still worried about hasLayout or rounding corners with images, or god forbid using tables for layout, or even setting explicit widths on your web pages instead of responsive media queries, you're adhering to obsolete ways of doing things that are hurting you more than helping.

Edit: Am I being downvoted because I'm wrong or because you just don't like what I have to say? Both are wrong reasons to downvote, but you go, you go downvote. My comment is reality. It may not be what you want to hear, but it isn't a low quality comment. I'm so tired of this silly site and it's potato filled echo chamber.

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No you are getting downvoted because you are as wrong as you can possibly get. And by the looks of it CSS focused... which I wouldn't even call engineering.

Things rarely go obsolete for one thing. Try explaining why COBAL, FORTRAN, VB6, ColdFusion, or hell more modern stuff like J2EE are still around and in good usage. Things become unpopular, often for good reason, but they don't go obsolete for well over a decade. When something costs over a million dollars to construct and its working OK then theres no reason to get rid of it. Most places can't afford multi million rebuilds because its become unfashionable.

What you also learn as you get older is most modern advances are just rehashes (often poorly as they where written over a month instead of years in a research lab) of existing ideas. Or they are nothing more than a load of premade scripts which are nice (and I'm very thankful for the ones I've used) but if you work with clients or existing stacks those often become problematic.

The new ideas that stick often take 5 years to get rolling, and another 5-10 before they sunset. I wouldn't call that quick by any stretch of the imagination. The hype moves fast... but the technology doesn't.

So separate yourself from the hype and you'll see a world moving a lot slower than you think, the given time the overwhelming torrent of new ideas starts to become a same old shit, different day scenario.

Experience also gives you the kind of skills that don't become obsolete, and which can't be learned in just a couple of years of practice:

- Writing reliable, maintainable and testable code

- Strategies for solving problems that are very large or very difficult

- The ability to interact well with developers, product managers, executives, customers, etc.

- Knowledge of algorithms and other fundamental things in computer science

Being a good software developer is about a lot more than just dealing with the mechanics of the particular software environment you happen to be using today.

Someone much more experienced than I am once said to me that experience doesn't teach you more answers, it teaches you more questions.

The answers change as the landscape evolves, but know which questions to ask...

Your comment is your perceived reality, and quite frankly it's wrong. If experience is a liability then the end-game of that line of thinking is there should be zero schooling or learning of any sort. If you're not learning everything from the ground up by yourself you're getting someone else's preconceived notions drilled into your head.

I'm sure you can see how this line of thinking leads to a total logical breakdown. The issue I think you are trying to illustrate oh-so-ineloquently is that a lot of developers ossify into "what they know". Then you end up in the "I have this one hammer and everything looks like a nail" issue that is actually real. Keeping up with current trends, tools and design patterns is definitely harder as you get older, but also one of the interesting parts of the job. For those who can't or won't adapt and learn, I'm sure there will be plenty of J2EE apps to maintain over the next few decades just like there are still Cobol apps to maintain now.

Getting stuck in your ways is a liability.

Someone who is continuously improving, while remaining aware of the current environment, will have experience as an asset.

Edit to your edit: You have much to learn...That's reality. Don't worry, I also have much to learn ;-)

Yes, you have to continuously improve, and also recognize that the things you learned before may no longer apply. Always know why you have to do the things you do and when that isn't true anymore.

Also I didn't understand half of what you said.

> also recognize that the things you learned before may no longer apply

You also have to learn when the things you learned before do apply. This is important because technology is cyclic. There are a constant stream of fads that many of the less experienced engineers won't be able to see alternatives to.

Only in programming do we have the gall to actually cast aspersions about experience.

This sentiment will bite you in the ass.

My favorite part of your comment is that most of the things you are complaining about were considered bad practice the last time I was a professional web developer and that was going on 15 years ago.

If you are routinely running into these issues, the problem isn't with the experience of your peer group, it's with their quality.

You're being down voted because what you're wrong (which I agree is not a good use of a down vote). You seem like someone who doesn't realize that software technology doesn't really change, just get painted a different color. Its like a Dunning-Kruger effect for life experience.

My Web pages use tables for layout, and each of my Web pages is exactly 800 pixels wide. It's simple. Dirt simple.

Using tables lets me put things on the page just where the heck I want them. I don't know of any easier way with HTML or CSS, and I'm not going to write any JavaScript -- won't do that. Having all my pages just 800 pixels wide is just what I want for my view of a good UI/UX for my Web site. And the Web pages should look okay on everything with a Web browser right up to date as of, say, five years ago. So, I'm not going to test my pages on several versions of each of several Web browsers on each of several devices and, with such simple Web pages likely don't have to. And I have no pop ups, pull downs, roll overs, or anything else that has the screen change just do to mouse movements or anything else except deliberate user actions.

That's the way I want the pages to be at least for now.

>at least for now.

That statement right there is the reason tables are a terrible idea for layout.

>implying silly CSS and javascript for your webapp is real programming

See? I can be edgy and abrasive too, with equal amounts of validity in your comment as in my summary of it.

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