A race to keep up

Today I read in a mailing list that Angular 2.0 is out and realized that I got much more removed from the front-end ecosystem than I thought. In fact, I hardly remember what Angular is about, not speaking of more specific details like what’s new or how it compares to other frameworks. And it’s been just 1 year away.

I love front-end for its incredible pace of innovation, but a very different thought just hit me: what if it’s not that good? There were many writings on that; I didn’t take it seriously, until now. Just 1 year — and you’re out. Relearn it all from scratch. Well, of course, the foundations are still the same, and after many years in the field learning new tooling is not a big deal, that’s what you do anyway to keep up. But’s that’s exactly the problem.

A lot of front-end engineer’s brainpower goes into just staying afloat. New tools are often not just all hip and fancy; they bring qualitative benefits, and getting proficient with them allows to build better products faster. So you either process enormous loads of information every day and work on something meaningful, or take it easy and do mostly boring stuff.

I get it; these are the early days of the web platform, the ecosystem is establishing, and things are going to slow down soon. But the problem is that those who chose to go front-end route recently have to sacrifice most of qualitative growth for the sake of keeping up, because brainpower is not unlimited. And all that massive investment does not make you a better professional, it just allows you to stay good.

That being said, those who got used to both keeping up and growing into other areas (backend, ux, product, management, etc) have an edge compared to slower-moving specialities, simply because they’re usually comfortable with heavier loads.