

Front end dev is getting exhausting - edward
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/2tfo30/frontend_dev_is_getting_exhausting/

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kls
I have been pretty vocal about my dislike of Angular, I will not beat it to
death because it has been gone over, again and again by others far more
willing to argue those points. Sufficient to say, Magic comes at a price and a
lot of people are now paying that price with Angular. I don't see the switch
away from it as more churn but as an acknowledgment that it was a wrong
direction for web front end technology.

Honestly, I hate to say it, because it is becoming the trendy framework, but
my personal opinion is that React is a step back towards the write direction.
Events and Web Components lead to decoupled code that can be treated as
independent black boxes. Which translates to a scalable and maintainable UI
codebase. We have circled around this concept with a few frameworks over the
years but none of them have hit critical mass like React/Flux seems to be
doing.

Anyways long story short, I know these has been a lot of churn in the front
end world, but I see this one as a needed and correcting step to get UI
development back on track.

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Udo
This is framework fatigue. Ruby on Rails for example made, and still makes,
front and back end web development tenable for people who don't necessarily
know what happens behind the scenes. The same goes for Angular in the front
end.

When you're starting out your programming career by programming against a
framework, you'll get very very good at doing things within that framework.
However, in the absence of exposure to lower levels of abstraction, this
knowledge will be your glass ceiling. There comes a time when you need to
level up as a developer - this usually means getting a deeper understanding of
what it is you actually do.

Of course, we're all web framework developers in a sense, even people who tend
to roll their own HTML/JS/CSS - and even these require you to look deeper into
how browsers perform tasks - but higher level frameworks tend to obscure
things quite a bit more. Also, higher level frameworks tend to have high rates
of internal change and external churn. To make matters worse, a lack of more
fundamental knowledge will always mean you're at a severe disadvantage when
judging the benefits and drawbacks of new frameworks as they come out.

A fad-based choice of programming tools is not a good recipe for keeping your
sanity, because you're perpetually reacting to any whim happening on the
cutting edge, especially if you follow the exaggerated bi-annual trends
slavishly ("and now, EVERYTHING has to be done in React!") - on the other hand
having an ear on the ground will help you. Fads do serve a purpose, because
they expose you to new ideas. But they kill you just as quickly if you pivot
your entire professional life to accommodate them.

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mooreds
Do you want to be a specialist or a generalist? The field of front end
development has finally matured to the point that the question makes sense in
this context (just like it has for back end development since about 2000).

I think it'd be better to be a generalist (hence some of the comments
suggesting gaining expertise in vanilla javascript), simply because things are
changing fast enough that it is hard to know which solution to bet on. That
may change in the future.

However, if you have time to keep up, there's tremendous career value in being
on the bleeding edge, as long as you are public about it.

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SapphireSun
I never understood this divide between front end and back end dev. Don't most
startups start off with one dev who just writes everything? Why would you want
to live in a box?

~~~
letstryagain
Why be a dentist, an optometrist, a physiotherapist, etc when you can just be
a GP? Why live in a box?

~~~
SapphireSun
Better toys. ;D

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dccoolgai
I know that feel. I picked a framework like everyone else (jsRender/jsViews).
It lost. So I decided not to take wing with the other framework locusts and
instead just focus on the underlying web platform: Service Workers, WebRTC,
ES6 ... so much cool stuff there and so much more on the way. That's where I
found peace - in knowing that as the framework dujour changes, those things
won't. The framework locusts will hop from Backbone to Angular to React... No
hate for anyone who flies with them - it feels great to see the thing you know
on the first line of that job description you really want... But you can find
peace for yourself as a front end dev if you embrace the web standards and
grow with it.

