Framework monopia

I read this post recently and it made me mad.

The TDLR of the post is that the author’s friend got hired at a Fortune 500 company where he was offered a significant salary raise. He left the company a few months later because priorities shifted and he was asked to work on an Angular project when he had signed up to work on React or Vue projects and he was scared of being “Jack of all trades”.

I quote:

It’s not like he couldn’t develop in AngularJS. He could learn within days, but he didn’t want to learn anything new for a job where there are plenty of ReactJS jobs out there.

And his philosophy was clear. He wanted to become an expert in something. He didn't want to be a “Jack of all trades”. He always wanted to be a master at something.        

I scoffed at this, but I probably got mad later, when he said “it was like a trap".

It gets better. I quote:

He noticed that he was better than most React developers in that company. [...] But he was better than them because he was stuck to this framework rather than being a “Jack of all trades”.        

I take no issue with switching a company for more money, or wanting to only write code with React. If that’s your cup of tea, fine by me. Tons of people out there probably make more than me being SAP consultants. It’s not my place whether you should do that or not.

But, the reasoning in this post stinks worse than Roquefort cheese.

Broadly, the logical threads are:

• Expertise in a tool or framework (React) makes you master of frontend development.
• Becoming proficient in another tool makes you “Jack of all trades” (and that’s bad or undesirable).
• You raise your value in a competitive market by sticking to one tool.

Let’s examine these.

First off, tools and frameworks come and go, every 5-10 years or so. Sticking your head in the sand and waiting for the one you use go out of fashion is a good way to become irrelevant. Like it or not, technology is moving very fast and systems are replaced continuously, not always for the right reasons. The key is staying relevant to a market segment you are somewhat attracted to and (still) has more demand than supply.

Secondly, if you are reluctant to switch to another tool when the job demands it tells me that you either a) you are comfortable where you are and can’t be bothered or b) you don’t understand the overarching concepts so a switch feels steep. It’s fine to be inflexible by choice but being master in React is not the same as being a master in frontend development. Being the latter requires a broader understanding of how the web works - and how React fits into that.

With the two above points in mind, it seems redundant to say that you raise your value in a competitive market by expanding your thinking so that you can be successful with any tool you’re given, like MacGyver .