Over the years, I have witnessed a lot of developments towards something we shouldn’t chase: Making people feel bad about using matured technologies and correlating confidence with skill.
About using technologies
In other sources, this observation was called Resumé-Driven-Development.
“We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession…”
— Tyler Durden
I think this is nothing totally new, to some degree I even share the opinion that this kind of development is shaping our industry. People have always been chasing to work with the latest tech.
I remember the days when I heard a lot of Javascript Developers moaning that there is yet another new framework. They were working on value delivering products, still chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They were unhappy despite being working on awesome solutions.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate…”
— Tyler Durden
Working with the latest tech and improving it on the way is probably the reason why we have nice things like frameworks, containerization and many other things. But it should not be mandatory for your personal happiness.
What I don’t like so much is people flattering themselves for working with this kind of technologies. I really hate people for looking down on other people because of the technology they use or don’t use at work.
Not everybody can work with the latest tech - more often they have limited choices.
“You are writing tomorrow’s legacy code every day - line by line”
— Myself
Somebody has to do the maintenance work for running applications on production. Not everybody can work on a greenfield project all the time.
Listen up maggots! You are not special! You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake! You are the same decaying organic
— Tyler Durden
I am not saying that you shouldn’t chase projects with up-to-date tech stacks - I would even advise you to. I am just saying that you shouldn’t smug to hard about it.
Correlating confidence with skill
Another trend I am observing is that confidence and visibility seem to go hand in hand with being recognized as a skilled Software Engineer.
This applies to:
- Rockstar developers on Twitter.
- Developers with a million followers on GitHub.
- The most visible developer of the team because he is an extrovert.
I met a lot of people who were rarely contributing to discussions. But when they did - you had to listen because their input was just that valuable.
Help these people to grow, their more regular input can be so beneficial to your team.
Recap
I think I am not totally innocent myself, nobody really is.
Still I hope that there will be a time, where even low voices will be heard and where we can see less hate on older technologies getting used - or at least less hate on the people still using them.
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