|
'Those who dared speak up were branded "negative" and "haters", no matter how much data they lugged in tow.' We were also just told we didn't know what we were talking about or didn't know how to write JS enough OR that we didn't work on complex enough applications that warranted needing CSS-IN-JS solutions or going all in on frameworks :) :) :) 27 comments
@hbuchel ahhhh I hate react but it’s all I know. So this piece is validating and frightening. Maybe I try Vue? (Still trying to get my first gig) @miguel TBH, not everyone has the privilege of choosing what (or if any) framework they use. Do what gets you hired, first and foremost, while also continuing to work on the fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JS, accessibility, performance). And working on the fundamentals pretty much never ends, at least I have found :) But they will carry you into and beyond any framework. @miguel Like, just for transparency, I write React at my job. I don't have the paygrade to completely shift that work to somewhere else. The "gaps" I specialize in (accessibility, UX) and what I think makes me a good engineer aren't specific to React, though. The same for my teammates; the things that set them apart aren't specific to a framework. That's just our job right now.  "They also worked behind the scenes to marginalise those who pointed out the disturbing results and extraordinary costs." This conversation is always much more sinister to me because when I think of the voices who were marginalized it is either people who come from existing marginalized communities in tech (women, Black people, POC) or those who just generally care about making accessibility and inclusivity a foundation of the tech that we build. I know it seems like I'm just talking about JS frameworks in general, but no one is going to convince me that the conclusion isn't there. I'm really not surprised that the white "Father, husband, React" crowd ignores the voices from those communities and that's largely why we are here, in this state of building things for the web in such a bad way. Like, was it just a cash grab, or was it ALSO a smattering of "hey pipe down with all that talk about inclusivity, that affects what, like 2% of our users, pft also what do you mean performance is better for accessibility, EYEROLL" I need someone who is much better at writing to talk about this intersection of bigotry and ignorance and how it led us to the current state of JS frameworks LOL Even typing that out seems like "wow that's kind of a leap" but then I also watched it happen so, yeah I feel like if I posted this on the other site it would just spawn subtweets like "🙄 wow guess I'm racist now because I like to use X framework" @hbuchel I'm no frontend JS expert but the guy seems to have hit a nail on the head. I now have a clear picture as to why *selecting text in an input field* in an internal corporate webapp I need to use is slow as shit. All powered by the newest shiny Dart frameworks giving tens of megabytes of JS for my browser to run. @enkiusz Oh yes. I remember some discussions about how this world of frameworks killed off that early "learn web dev by looking at view source" and people kind of hand waved that off ("who does that anymore", "there are better ways to learn", etc) But this is the other side of that. So many of these apps/websites are just broken if you try to archive/save them. @enkiusz And I feel like this is such a special part of the web, the GOOD part, the preserving of information. It's definitely deteriorated. @hbuchel would love to read this. i don't really follow much in like, various language communities, but the excessively fast churn of the javascript framework/tooling ecosystem vs. other languages feels quite exclusionary.  @hbuchel Oh yeah, that would be an interesting blogpost! If there's any merit to this idea? Good theory anyways...  @hbuchel Omg this. Father husband React, and disrupt-market-startup-acquire. And the venn diagram has tons of overlap. Both really white. Both really dismissive of disability. Both specifically and almost completely dismissive of longevity. @aredridel The "dismissive of longevity" part is so spot on, because who can afford to keep up with that? Those that are already "in" or those who have the cushion (money/time/support) to learn. While how we build for the web can and should evolve, it's very sad to me that the accessible (easy to enter into learning) side of web development was stomped all over in lieu of "no actually you need to know this really complex framework that only grows in complexity the larger your application is"  @hbuchel Thank you for linking to this excellent article and for this whole thread. This current situation hurts everyone so much. @hbuchel @baldur when it comes to js frameworks I am in fact negative and a hater but that probably has a heck of a lot to do with the dynamics you've just described. Tech went out of its way to paint the front end as inferior, not really programming, just markup, and every other dog whistle for "for girls," and then needed to masculinize it with a frathouse atmosphere and layers of needless complexity in order to justify higher comp for men. Same old song, different key. @Annalee @baldur 100% this. It was an area of the web that women were already succeeding in, so now it has to become "the easy part, the 'just making it look nice' part, the part that pays less". And now of course people are circling back because they've realized their applications are awful because they have poor performance, are STILL hard to maintain, and have shitty UX/accessibility. @hbuchel @Annalee @baldur As a man who used to manage front end dev teams, I... well, I agree 100%. The amount of arrogant fuckwittery I spent my days fending off so my diverse team could just do excellent HTML, CSS, and JS work that supported the company's business goals instead of playing yobbish ego coder games was insane. And it was always the women on my team who were seen as suspect even though they were doing the best work. Argh. I should take my blood pressure meds now.  @hbuchel :) = 🫠, just me wanting to melt away when experiencing those discussions. everything you say is so true. Thank you for laying it all out in the open here. @paulkruczynski Yeah, to think I let people say that to me after I had worked with universities, government, and oh, idk, AMAZON. Like how much more global and how much more scale do I need to show I work on UI with complexity, friends? The truth is some of us work in the real world outside of todo-app examples and the math wasn't and still isn't math'ing in the js framework world. |
Gregory's Server
@hbuchel Gatekeepers gonna something-something.