5

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

Comments
  • 2
    The reason is because modern front end guys aren't really programmers.

    They're just good a gluing shit together from npm.

    And they can't really "work to improve their craft" because every control on the page somebody else wrote.

    It's like... if you want to be an artist, you can only go so far with cutting out construction paper and gluing it together. And I mean... it is very fast... and you could go a long way... look at south park. That's all they did.

    But if you're the type of artist who really wants to improve their skillset purely for the sake of their craft, then eventually you have to put down the construction paper and glue stick and pick up some oil paints.

    But these devs... they don't want to be Monet... they WANT to be Matt and Trey. Right? Construction paper is their pièce de résistance.

    So, until the world realizes you can do their entire job with like 20 lines of CSS... we're fucking stuck with them.
  • 0
    @HiFiWiFiSciFi
    Sorry but no.

    The least helpful thing is not realising why certain things might not as easy as you think.
    The idea that frontend wouldn't require any programming skills is just ignorant.

    Not approaching things in a way that acknowledges why it matters to do things as good as possible and that might way harder and not at all the same as getting it to work.
  • 2
    👍 solid rant, but missing paragraphs..too much monolithic text, almost gave up on reading..
  • 3
    Tl;dr: attitude matters. And amen to that. "Good enough" is never what you should aspire for. Good enough is the point where you should reflect and gather insight on where you could improve.

    I also agree, that it seems to be mainly a frontender issue, probably because it's easier to get into frontend than it is backend, thanks to places like dev.to and medium and some idiotic JS-evangelist YT channels (and more).
  • 0
    @i-like-foxes which part of this isn’t as easy as I think?
  • 0
    @HiFiWiFiSciFi
    Everybody can build almost every feature possible.
    But it seems hard to do it in a way that you still can add features 2 years later, without taking 10 times the time a similar feature took in the beginning.
Add Comment