If your CV only contains jQuery…
ayende.com
ayende.com
React/Angular is not that complicated to get started with. You can just teach them on the job and have an opportunity to teach them correctly. These frameworks aren't some high arcana that you need to take a sabbatical from the world and isolate yourself on a mountain village to learn.
I dove in and did reasonably well coming from exactly this person's background with no prior experience except for tutorials.
You basically responded with "We can't afford a single week and a pluralsight subscription".
>It indicates a lot about the candidate, including the ability to learn and develop oneself on your own.
Oh nice, let's just ignore 4 years of university + X years at the first job because that certainly indicates nothing about someone's learning and development.
Many compsci professors will be sad to learn that Github replaces their entire usefulness to society.
> I dove in and did reasonably well coming from exactly this person's background with no prior experience except for tutorials.
great it was so easy for you. In my experience, they are complicated to get started with and to really be proficient with, does require a lot of upfront learning and understanding - especially with react.
As opposed to React or any other modern web stuff. Those skills will last a lifetime.
If you're still on jQuery at this point, with no effort to move off it, it's likely either a small project, or one with excessive tech debt, or one with no desire to modernize.
On the other side, there's plenty of new tech that my company isn't using yet, but will let me study or send me to conferences to learn about. Just because you work somewhere that's still built on old tech doesn't mean you can become proficient with newer ones. Especially if you're planning to look for a new job at a company who likely does.
I disagree. JQuery and React are just tools. Using one or the other doesn't mean one has more tech debt or its a small project. You should use the one that gets the job done. By saying JQuery is 'bad' and React is 'good', the programmer fails to understand the purpose of the tool.
The question the programmer should ask is whether choosing one over the other has any advantage in that particular project. I program frontend reluctantly when needed because I am a backend programmer. But I would choose either tool depending on what is needed.
Unless jQuery has added a lot of features I'm not familiar with, it's not comparatively well-suited to larger and more modular projects like that. These days, it would mostly be used in projects that are small enough to not need the extra features from React, are bound to an architecture that makes implementing it hard, or has management/senior developers who prefer to stay with older tech.
It's not that one is bad and one is good. It's that they're specifically good at different things that tend to point to different styles of development and project scope.
Jquery is great. it's fast, it's powerful, easy to learn. But It's not "new" and that's why people raise their noses at it.
Modern JS has a ton of things which are supported by all mainstream browsers and combined with CSS, HTML5 form validation, etc. there’s a lot of simple work which can be done with no external dependencies and using skills which last far longer.
I agree with the lack of analysis portion being a common thing, but that's something you have to work out for yourself as a part of the process. It's not as if React is the only faddish tool over the years - I'm sure there are plenty of older projects that are only using jQuery because it was the new hotness. And even more that were initially done with jQuery, but would probably work better with React if it weren't for the Lead's disinclination to learn a new framework. There's plenty of fad chasing, but there's also plenty of bull-headed resistance to new tech.
The question of if React or jQuery or Vue or whatever is the best framework to use for a specific company or product is tangential to the question of if someone with only jQuery experience can be effective on a team with React as its core tech. The decisions have been made at that point.
That is a bold statement. Not all of us are working on throw-away websites which need to last for a year at most and can always use the latest tech. Some of us, probably many of us, work on applications which need to last for years to come. Applications for which ye olde multi-page application model works fine.
That doesn't mean those application are trash, but it does mean you cannot switch to a popular frameworks every few years because those applications are huge.
One application I'm working on is nearing an age of 15 years, in which it is continuously but slowly modernizing. It does use JQuery, but for some of the newer parts, where suitable, libraries like Knockout for adding some interactivity.
First. This is the most difficult software to work on. Something already created, in production, you must learn what 'they were thinking', make modifications AND not creating side effects. Anyone, can take on a new project, google, and pick React. This statement shows a complete lack in software design experience.
Next. Maybe the person was working at a startup and the startup was stretched for cash. Maybe this person really believed in the idea and was trying to help the company survive and thrive. Rewriting everything from scratch is the worst thing you can do [documented by people with much more credibility [1]] -- so maybe this person put the company first and worked late nights finishing features.
Some people do not follow RBF software design principles [Resume build first]. But oh well, you learned React at some point through a web video, so you are much more valuable employee: bullshit. I hope the person the OP hires, wastes work hours convincing others to convert everything to 'vue.js' and digs into why React was a bad choice.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
It's hard enough to look for a job...
The only meaningful tidbit is buried at the end: of course it's important to demonstrate a willingness to learn, and many people fail to demonstrate that time and time again.
Fuck react. I have tried so many times to pick it up and run with it - but every time it just gets more confusing and absurd. I have never come across a technology like this before, with such ridiculous & obscure surface area and changing implementation.
I mention this because to the casual observer (or hiring manager) it would appear as unwillingness. But the reality is: not everything can be learned equally. some people get react in a way they've never gotten anything else before. I get that, because that's what Rails is for me.
People have limits - React is one of mine. Which is unfortunate given its popularity.
If you define those limits and don't get turned down _before_ the interview you can articulate that in the interview.
In all seriousness, everyone starts somewhere. I have seen people with zero experience in a technology become complete beasts in months with a little direction and help - even better (or just as good) than someone with a good amount of experience. You find the right person willing to learn, it’s a bargain.
So here's some free advice: don't talk about individual candidates publicly, not even anonymously, and especially not in such a negative way. It's in extremely bad taste, and you have nothing whatsoever to gain from it.
Those guys must hire by keywords.
No one would ever hire me for my front end skills.
But the market has spoken. It's on my agenda to learn at least one front end framework. ASP.Net MVC isn't going to cut it in today's market.
Also, if he does html, css, jquery and ajax and you’d be ok with hiring an angular dev... then why not hire the guy who actually knows JavaScript?
Extend the moment of self-reflection and ask yourself if you're in a position to give out advice on hiring others.
(For candidates, the implied advice — latch on to buzzwords and be insincere about your actual knowledge — is unfortunately effective in many places, of course.)
Also I tend not to put technologies on my CV unless I have done something more substantial than online classes and tutorials. I don’t want to have to answer an interview question about “what’s your experience with Foo?” with “oh just some tutorials...” . That would cast doubt on the rest of my experience. Ask the candidate if they have experience in any frameworks and they might surprise you and say that they have been learning one in their spare time.
Because frameworks/libraries like Angular and React were largely adopted due to this issue, people who have had success with them (or just need to justify the switch), have come to see these as part of the solution and jQuery as part of the problem.
If you're an interviewer who only sees jQuery on an application, you can use this as a chance to get to see what the candidate thinks about the evolution of web development. See if they can have a reasonable discussion about trade-offs made on choosing one over the other. This will expose their critical thinking skills and values as a developer and you may even get a new perspective yourself. To be honest, I'd rather work with someone who could have this discussion rather than just blindly adopt what everyone else is using ... well ... just because.
In my job -where I'm not in HR- I've seen plenty of candidates with hundreds of skills listed in their LinkedIn profile, only to find out later, when they were hired, their complete lack of understanding of the most basic principles related to the field we're working on.
from the elitist attitude who jumped the fence off development and pretends to measure a cv with, by his own admission, outdated knowledge
then there's the shaming of a guy that's just entered the workforce (because three years are very little all considered, whatever the ba tries to make you believe) for not being skilled enough in more than the basics, pretending someone to have experience in dozen advanced frameworks even if it's likely to be out of place for a junior to start working react/angular off the bat.
there's that shitty management attitude too of "we don't train people here only leverage existing knowledge" which smells of a very very bad workplace environment to be, sold as if it were a plus
and the icing on the cake: "I would expect the candidate at this point to actively work at improving their skills." - jesus, you can feel the privilege oozing out of the paragraphs.
It's the same thing as grade inflation, you see many B students with 3.9 GPA's.
It seems to me that people switch jobs frequently. There's no sense in training people if they leave before your investment in training pays off. Why wouldn't you want to profit from the fact that people can educate themselves on programming skills?
You brought up privilege, but a good and friendly workplace environment is only for the privileged. Potential workers are everywhere, but employment is scarce. There's no business incentive to bend over for your workers when you don't have to.
This is exactly why golden handcuffs exist.
> Potential workers are everywhere, but employment is scarce.
It's not 2009 anymore. U-5 (unemployed + discouraged workers + marginally attached workers) is currently less than 5%. The last time it was that low was Dec 2000. That's all workers of any type. The market for programmers is even tighter still.
Think harder. Which demographic can afford to train off hours?
At the same time, we live in an era when developers can use free (in both senses) dev tools, consume free tutorials on YouTube, and showcase what they've absorbed with a free GitHub account. I think you're grandstanding a bit on the 'privilege' angle.
For the other comment :
> Think harder. Which demographic can afford to train off hours?
That absolutely holds water if a person in question never spends an hour or two on reality shows or soaps, which will do zero to improve chances in a really tough employment market.
It all depends on what your goals are: Do you want a modern, bloated, ugly, generic, JavaScript framework heavy site or do you want to put actual content out there in a beautiful, professional and minimalist manner? Your choice.
I consider it unprofessional to rubber stamp SPA as an approach. Yes, it's "modern" but often overkill. I am all about choosing the right tool/approach for the job. 9 times out of 10, that means HTML/CSS and a sprinkling of JS. For all other times, there's SPA.