Marco Rogers:

Companies that want to reduce the cost of their frontend tech becoming obsoleted so often should be looking to get back to fundamentals. Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.

You should really go read the whole article. There is a lot that resonates with me.

The ability to work on “legacy” code is a valuable skill that I specifically look for when I’m hiring. It’s fine to want to make things better and follow new conventions, but it shouldn’t be a blocker to being productive. Business doesn’t stop and wait while the app is rewritten to use React Hooks or whatever.

People that are learning the current tech ecosystem are absolutely not learning web fundamentals. They are too abstracted away. And when the stack changes again, these folks are going to be at a serious disadvantage when they have to adapt away from what they learned. It’s a deep disservice to people’s professional careers, and it’s going to cause a lot of heartache later.

I don’t work on the frontend very often these days, but I’m always thankful that I learned web development before React. I started my career reading CSS Tricks and deploying CSS, Javascript, and HTML files with FTP 🤣 I’ve noticed full stack engineers on social media worried about how fast frontend tech moves, but I think if you know these fundamentals, learning a new framework is not a big deal.