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0 pointsOnavo2mo ago0 comments

If you ask an EE to debug react state management code without prior exposure they won't do too well either. But on the other hand they can easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer who can optimize code for a specific architecture would take months.

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sublinear2mo ago

> they can easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course

I have to disagree and question what you mean by "optimization". It's very easy to write web code that technically accomplishes a task, but does so poorly. This is the natural consequence of having so many options available.

The vast majority of web devs with less than 5 years of experience simply don't understand plain javascript well enough. It's a longstanding problem that devs will reach for the most ergonomic tools, not the best tools.

Lacking sufficient experience, they can't help it. This happens in all programming languages and in all layers of software. AI slop is even worse because it tends towards the mean.

ontouchstart2mo ago

Engineering is more or less about getting familiar with the proper tools and use them to solve specific problems: add new features, debugging, refactoring and optimizing.

And the tools themselves are built by other engineers and they need new features, debugging, optimization etc. It is turtles all the way down.

But each layer has its own jargons, conventions and unwritten hacks. That is where experience comes in. Once you get out off a rabbit hole or pothole, you are one step closer to becoming the “domain expert”. There is no short cut.

johnnyanmac2mo ago

>The vast majority of web devs with less than 5 years of experience simply don't understand plain javascript well enough

they are never tested on it, and many won't dig that deep in the day-to-day. Whose fault is it that they don't know plain javascript well enough? That's the result of shipping "content" over any other metric of proper software engineering.

Funnily enough I did take a mini-course (not a week, but we're talking maybe 100 hours of work as a recreational online summer class) in plain javascript at my university. Quite the quirky language. But this was in ES3 or so, so maybe there's many more guard rails these days against the core jank that makes up JS

ignoramous2mo ago

> EE to debug react state management ... easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer ... would take months

Isn't that mostly because as you go up the abstraction layer, tools and docs to teach yourself the tricks of trade fast are in abundance (let alone a popular layer like React)? Which inturn is likely a function of incentives and opportunities.

fny2mo ago

It's because the higher up the stack you go, tools become more declarative and literate. Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example.

giancarlostoro2mo ago

> Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example.

This was one of my gripes in college, why am I implementing something if I just need to understand what it does? I'm going to use the built-in version anyway.

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