
Front-end is a mess, now what can we do? How do you do in large IT companies? - a_saberi
A little background on me, I work as an intermediate front-end developer in Yellow Pages. I like my job and I want to improve myself constantly. I have a bachelor, and master in electrical engineering, however, I found job market with my academic background not much promising, so I started and developed my career in web development.<p>With this background you, I started learning, working since three years ago; basically anything from online tutorials to blogs, and sometimes reference books. BUT everything is changing at very very fast pace e.g in the past three years JavaScript has gone into 5, 6, 7, etc.  AngularJS has come from version 1 to 5.<p>and I am getting really tired of following up.  Sometimes, when I look back, I ask myself why? Why I selected front-end? why? Well, it looked easy at the beginning. Even a high school kid can start it.<p>I like to know about you guys, so-called hackers community. How do you deal with these changes? At some point, I want to say, I know everything on front-end and I want to move on to back-end. but I am stoped by tons of changes, and updates that are coming out every six months.<p>Also, for those who work for large, and famous companies(Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, Groupon, Airbnb, Uber). How do you learn new techs? Do you spend your spare time to learn new things or there are tools or programs inside the company that make you progress? or let&#x27;s say this way:
How do large IT organizations help their engineer employees to improve their technical skills (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, Groupon, Airbnb, Uber, etc.)?
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twunde
To your explicit question, Google and most large companies run formal training
programs (think college courses). However most are about learning a new skill
(like teaching beginner Python), not about learning a new tool although those
presumably exist. Many companies also have one-off learning events. The big
difference in working for these large organizations is that the tooling is
much better, so its easier to easily update and start incorporating the latest
updates into your tech stack. It's not that big a deal to upgrade from Angular
1 to Angular 2 since you have tools to allow you to do big refactors as well
as tests to catch any regressions. You're not doing a full rewrite but always
incremental refactoring often with both versions at the same time. A front-end
developer should be exposed to some of the newest technologies.

With that said, you're probably going to learn some of this tech on your own
time. What you should be finding is that many of these frameworks are very
similar and are incorporating the same ideas. Moving from Angular to Ember or
Vue should be relatively easy. The big difference is learning the new api and
the nuances. Things like properly configured IDEs will make this significantly
easier (I'm a HUGE fan of Jetbrains' products).

At this point, you're dealing with javascript fatigue. It's definitely
acceptable to switch to backend or full-stack development. Personally I'd talk
to a colleague about the possibilities there. Additionally there's the point
that you don't need to learn everything. Whatever javascript framework you're
using, you can just spend time becoming an expert in that. There's no need to
learn a different one until you've switched jobs.

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a_saberi
I asked this question on Quora: [https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-do-
large-IT-organizatio...](https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-do-large-IT-
organizations-help-their-engineer-employees-to-improve-their-technical-skills-
e-g-Google-Microsoft-Amazon-Facebook-Morgan-Stanley-Groupon-Airbnb-Uber-
etc?__filter__&__nsrc__=2&__sncid__=995600920)

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malux85
You’re never going to know “everything” about anything.

Being a hacker is knowing when something is good enough. Your time is limited,
so pick the right battles.

Pick up some backend stuff and just do it. You will learn in time. Seek
inspiration from people greater than you. Be inspired, it will drive you to
action.

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dyeje
Just pick a well adopted tool that makes sense to you and stick with it. Once
you have a good grasp of one, it's not too hard to pick up another one if you
have to.

