Don’t be a React Engineer
So before a bunch of JS freaks with React tattoos @ me to death like some overzealous T Swift fans let’s get ahead of this whole thing and understand that I’m speaking from a career perspective and this is not a technical post. If I was going to do something technical it would be how to achieve max percentage great/excellent throws using Pokemon size vs. distance as predictable data points but that’s for another day.
You know what I would do if I had a ton of superfluous cash? The ultimate recruiting troll. I would hire a team of wicked smart developers to build some sort of JS framework that was barely Open Source worthy. Then I would pay a couple hundred UI evangelists to blog about it, do some glossed up POC’s, and soon we’d be littered with PantzSharkJS developers in 6 months once the McCode academies pick it up. A couple hot tech companies put it into production and BOOM! HR backspaces all their UI job tiles to say “PantzSharkJS Engineer” and floods the internet with posts. Ultimately they fail and enlist the help of agency recruiters who eliminate with malice any developer resume’ that doesn’t have PantzSharkJS on it three or more times. The interview process starts and competent engineer, after competent engineer is eliminated for lack of specific experience with PantzSharkJS. Actually it’s just PantzShark now because we dropped the JS and made it strongly typed. Yes folks, mere months have passed and the original adopters of this framework are now legacy.
How did we get to this? Ultimately it’s not the fault of the engineers for making Kardashian siblings out of specific pieces of technology but it is the engineers who have to deal with it. JavaScript frameworks are just one example of the rampant buzz word heavy grading system that is putting flame throwers to engineering backgrounds void of the neon flashing lights recruiters and HR are looking for. When I was in the agency world I had an HR manager laugh in my face when I sent an 8 year JavaScript engineer for a UI position that required beginner AngularJS experience. This particular dev was born out of the fire of vanilla JS and it was their primary language of choice. She also knew ActionScript and learned, POC’ed, designed and coded an ExtJS front-end for an enterprise level app at her former job. Nope. No Angular. Guess what happened when I sent a 5-year dev who had done nothing but mark-up and tagging with HTML/CSS but had 6 months of AngularJS. They had a parade. It lasted all the way up to when the candidate got crushed on their technical interview.
The catalyst for this blog is my current experience running talent acquisition for a rapidly growing consulting company. It’s the toughest job I’ve ever had in my life because we’re a full-stack shop that’s also platform agnostic so my team doesn’t really care about what’s on your resume.’ No React? What is your JS bundle of choice? Why? What OO and functional languages do you dig? What side of the API are you most comfy on? What have you stood up in the cloud? What do you use for CI/CD? It was never the best resume’ that got the job, and when I actually compared the backgrounds of the first dozen hires I made, they were pretty diverse except for one thing. Possession of software engineering best practices, a history of both building and failing to build something, Computer Science degrees, on the job mentors who teach you fundamentals, side projects with engineers who are better than you. Even the code academies pumping out “YourNameHere” developers have value if they get you on track to a career in developing software. But the machine propagating the message that you can ride one piece of technology or tech stack to greatness and be that full-stack developer of your dreams is false. MEAN, MERN, MERMAN, MERMAID, whatever. Software is the dairy product of engineering so whether you eat it or let it spoil it’s transitory and fleeting. I believe Miss Grande put it best. Thank you, next. If I was wrong you wouldn’t even have to read this stupid blog because we’d all be happily running jQuery27.
