December 20th, 2023 Don't be a React Developer By Jeffrey M. Barber

I’ve pondered hiring, and I’ve ran plenty of job ads to find people. Reviewing resumes quickly becomes depressing… The mixture of hope and the sheer volume of newbieness becomes overwhelming. My heart breaks because I understand the pain of being on the outside, but what can people do? How do newbs become less newbie?

From my vantage point, I view the entire endeavor of building skills to build software as a descent within a tree of knowledge. Some knowledge will last longer than others, the roots of this tree are the core mathematics that everyone should acquire with a computer science degree. As you move from the soil, the artifacts to learn are expensive endeavors like operating systems or the browser. The expense and inertia of these platforms are less likely to change across decades (in any serious way). As you branch out and the options become more plentiful, the risk increases as well.

It’s a sad tale when someone has picked a tech stack, and then they can’t find a job to leverage that stack. This is what sucks about seeing the buzzword bingo aspects of resumes. Just keywords without a clarity on the nature of the experience. It’s a pessimistic numbers games being played out where both sides are… well… newbie.

When I think of this tree, the best long term strategy to transition from a survival state of existence towards an abundance mode of operation is to start to seek wisdom. Every season, the leaves in my trees will fall to the ground, so we should not seek comfort in some bit of momentary inertia or convenience. Instead, we should leverage the leaves as ways to deepen our understanding and study at the lower branches and root knowledge.

Reflect on the wisdom of Bruce Lee:

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

Bruce Lee

This applies to software as well. It’s the dilemma of 10 years of first year experience vs 10 years deep experience. The buzzword bingo of a resume signals inexperience, and instead I want to see invention and creation. I want to see a creative individual! I don’t want to see a statistical histogram of technologies poked around with!?!

Beyond reading patio11’s Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice, my core advice that I tell everyone is to learn the foundations of what you’re doing. If you want to specialize in front-end technologies, then you need to master the browser rather than some framework; your mastery of the browser should inform you why these libraries exist. The browser as a platform is going to be stable for an exceptionally long time while the current mess of npm and frameworks is a meta problem.

When you learn a foundational layer, you also need to learn the appropriate sales pitch for yourself as well. The easy mode operation is to pick a tech stack and hope that sells yourself, but then you’re in a large market of people who also took the easy way. The hard mode of life is to go your own way.

The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.

Warren Buffett

Going your own way is also the most rewarding.. It’s also a lot of work since any job is going to want you focused 100% on whatever the job wants which may or may not include time for your own growth. Going your own way turns your life into a montage of preparing by deepening your knowledge until one day… you enter the arena.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt