I’m a trendy developer — I’m one of THOSE
I was reading Programmer Moneyball this morning and quickly realized that the author was talking trendy developers just like me. I’m one of those people that companies spend vast amounts of money to hire (and most of the time fail to hire). My story isn’t a unique one to the industry. I learn the hottest latest tech and my resume is littered with technology that has been around for less than 5 years, sometimes less than 2 years.
It’s an interesting situation to be in but it also isn’t the most favorable one, despite what HackerNews and Reddit might think.
How I got here
Probably the most interesting part of my story is how I got here. I’m obviously a self-taught developer. In fact, I’d bet that most of the “trendy devs” are self-taught and the reason is simple: it gives us edge. Trying to apply for a proper computer science job, an academic job, or a job at a big enterprisey company without a degree is still a pain and it was much more of a pain 10 years ago.
When I started development, this meant that I had to look for ways to one-up my competition. The first part was that degree-wearing devs often fell into the enterprise language and technology buckets to begin with. In short, I couldn’t compete with people for Java and C# positions let alone anything low-level like C++ or C. Luckily, the former two were my only concerns as a web developer.
One of the ways I could compete was to look for startups as they wanted to cut costs and at the time going in without a degree meant you were paid less. Today, it’s not AS true but there seems to be a bias nevertheless. Startups were great because they wanted the job done, they cared little for academia, and for technological innovation.
My first few jobs were a “get shit done” jobs where my personal growth, the technology I picked, and longevity didn’t matter. Over the next few years, I fell on the Wordpress bandwagon which was the “hot” technology at the time.
And thus began my journey. PHP was my way to go and before I knew it, I landed an “enterprisey PHP” position. I thought, “Finally! I can finally join the ranks among the other enterprisey developers!” And why I thought that was a positive thing, I’ll tackle next but in the meantime, things didn’t work out that way.
The company I worked for was enterprisey but not enterprise. It was small enough that we ended up breaking out of “legacy” PHP and started rewriting everything in the next big thing: Node and Angular. Suddenly jQuery disappeared, Angular replaced everything and before we hit 1.0 without product, we rewrote everything in React. Then suddenly mythril took us by surprise, and ember was looming on the horizon.
Before I knew it, I left my job and started building more apps using trendy technology. And now, I’m left in a cycle of “trendy” tech that never ends.
The Cycle
I’m a team lead on a small team currently building a VC-backed product. VCs for some reason love hot technology. God-forbid we wanted to use something like PHP, even if it was PHP 7 and Laravel or Symfony. Anyways, when I came on board and started hiring, I noticed something.
The enterprisey sort of CS-bearing developers have a difficult time moving forward quickly. They’re good at solving problems, sure, but tell them that you’re using React a year after it comes out, and they’ll flip their shit.
The common issues I hear from these developers are:
- “Why can’t we build our own front-end framework? Vanilla JS is good enough.”
- “Node? We should use Ruby on Rails, it’s been out longer.”
- “What if they make breaking changes? Why don’t we use Backbone. It has a solid API.”
All valid concerns. The thing they don’t consider is that we’re in a cycle. A cycle where using older technology runs the risk of BAD hires. And I’m not talking about the enterprise developers. They have their own issues but I’m afraid of: zombie trendy developers. Zombie trendy developers are trendy developers that got stuck in the past. So they bear neither CS knowledge nor the adaptability to get with the latest tech.
The problem is, I’m stuck in that cycle too. If I went to find a front-end job that focuses on jQuery, I’d be fucked. If I went to find an Angular job, I’d be fucked too. Angular 1 jobs are rapidly disappearing. And no one would believe me that I could pick up React if I had been doing jQuery for the past 10 years and nothing else.
On the other hand, had I started with C# or Java, 10 years alter, I’d still be able to find a job. If I knew Java, I could argue I could do Scala. If I knew C#, I could still do C# or argue I could do Java/Scala. Experience in these bigger lasting techs translates really well to other big lasting techs. Hell, I might even find a Golang job!
But jQuery? Nope. jQuery is a RED flag. It’s a red flag for me as a hiring manager and a red flag for me as a job-seeker.
My experience counts…sometimes
No, seriously. My PHP background is as close to non-trendy as I get but it’s not good enough. In my line of work, uttering the words “Java” or “C#” or “C++” will get you fired (not really, but you get my point). Using vanilla JS is fine, as long as you keep up with JS trends as well: ES2015, transpilation, etc.
Part of my career is to literally jump ship as quickly as I can because my experience is constantly made irrelevant. Angular 1.X background will get me another year or two but already, people ask “Have you used Angular 2 yet?”. KnockoutJS used to be my crutch (I have heavy background in it, and I thought it was here to stay) but recently, people don’t even know what KO is. I have React experience but even that is not enough, “Uh-huh, so how about Flux? Actually, do you know Redux? We’re not Flux fans.”
A couple of months ago, I was rejected from a job (partly) because I didn’t use a particular compile-to-JS language. Another applicant had “minimal” experience in the language, as far as I was told, and that gave him a winning edge. This is not unheard of in the industry. That’s why doing a few tutorials on one technology and a few tutorials on another without doing a deep dive and having hardcore experience with it is more useful. Being able to say “I played around with React, Redux and Flux” is much more valuable than saying, “I’ve been working with MV* style frameworks for the past 6 years from Backbone to Angular”.
On the other hand, a recruiter set me up with C# and Java interviews in the past. The discussions mostly revolved around architecture and engineering principles rather than the latest Java frameworks or the latest C# features. Yet, these companies discarded any and all experience I had up until that point and placed me in the Junior category with about half the salary I was currently making.
So what do I do?
I don’t like the idea that my entire career hinges on learning the newest tech but that’s what it seems like. I’d like to think that I’m a “real engineer” despite what “real engineers” might think. I enjoy the CS part of my job much more than learning “Preadux”. In fact, I’d much more enjoy CREATING “Preadux” than consuming tutorials on it. Before anyone asks, yes, I do in fact spend my time building a good deal of side-projects but those rarely count for anything when they’re outside of a work environment.
At my work place, I lead a team of developers, and I try to instill good code practices in the organization, architecture, proper design patterns (and a lack of as well), and so on. I get pleasure from doing this. And I’d love to somehow make that leap from being a tech lead on trendy technology to being an engineer working on big problems that require more thinking than just “what NPM package do I install for this”
I WILL say one thing. I used to have a tech manager that shared my type of thinking and dedicated the team efforts to building software that we could open source along the way and that solved real industry problems (and scale problems as well). Rather than focus on “GSD” (Get Shit Done), we focused on problem solving on a larger scale with meaningful long-term impact. Suddenly, work mattered much more than previously. And suddenly, we’d start running into problems that required real ingenuity to solve them. Technology mattered less at that point and the solution mattered more.
Anyways, all ramblings aside. I’m doing my best to break that “trendy engineer” cycle where one simply learns the bare minimum of a new technology
