Agreed. I've worked with quiete a bunch of frontend developers on react applications (with serverside rendering) who didn't realise that in the end all it does is render HTML pages. And didn't have any or much experience with old school HTML and vanilla javascript. This only became a real problem when there were edge cases or external scripts needed to be integrated that didn't fit in the framework.

I see these kinds of comments all the time here on HN “X developer colleague of mine was really clueless about Y technology they were using” and they are so unfathomable to me. I’ve worked with bad colleagues & people who made foolish comments but usually the worst colleagues I’ve had err on the side of immensely increasing complexity. And generally everyone I’ve worked with had a basic understanding of the tech we were using or was a junior with some curiosity.

Who are these completely clueless developers? How do they get hired?

Some of them were indeed clueless. But also a bunch of them were great developers. I remember one who came from Flash and easily adopted the react.js SPA mindset without really understanding HTML/dom. For him almost never was it a practical problem, but it was interesting to see sometimes and he would have a completely different approach to the web. He for instance didn't understand at first why I wanted URL's to stay the same and meta title's to be correctly set. I don't have a principle problem with it. It's just an interesting development.

came from... Flash? so he was doing FLASH right until now?

> And didn't have any or much experience with old school HTML

A good heuristic for how good a web developer is is getting them to list every HTML element they know, including the deprecated ones like <marquee>. You would be surprised just how little elements they know, and more importantly, the semantic value of the elements. For example, knowing when to use <span> instead of <div>

Is encyclopedic knowledge of something that can be searched online a good heuristic for skill? I thought the community agreed this was not a good thing when it came to fizz-buzz type software interviews.

IMO in frontend world there are two important things: knowing how to search, and knowing how to determine which search results are useful as opposed to some Medium/blogpost fluff piece that is varying degrees of misinformed.

If you have experience with a framework, you should naturally be able to list things you commonly use.

I was recently at an interview where they just asked me to name a list of CloudFormation functions I’ve used and what did I use them for. If I listed that on my resume as something I knew, it was fair game.

@bobthepanda

It is not a good heuristic if the person has two days to prepare in that it is very gameable.

It is important to be able to develop things _quickly_ in order to keep a job. For that, knowing how to search is indeed useful. But there are certain things that it is worth keeping in L1 cache.

> But there are certain things that it is worth keeping in L1 cache.

I doubt that the laundry list of things that have gotten tossed out of W3C's HTML standards is one of them, as the grandfather comment implied.

Thanks a lot for the list of books on your site. I didn’t know about allaboutcircuits.com before. Now I do.