Please help the guy before he gets too far along. Some of us might have to work with him.

Seriously though, I saw someone described as a 22 yr old software engineer in an article. There is a better term: "Software Engineering Apprentice"

For context, he's 40 years old and working in data science after a career switch from another data-heavy field. He's just learning web dev to build internal pages for displaying stuff, so no need to worry :D

Unionize already.

It's not just about wage, it's about assigning appropriate work to peoples level and having them progress through the most efficient steps to mastery while also completing billable hours

> ...it's about assigning appropriate work to peoples level and having them progress through the most efficient steps to mastery...

that's the opposite of what a union does. A union rewards seniority and nothing else.

Yeah...OK. Found the union hater.

Normally workers unionize to improve their poor conditions vs an abusive employer, and when they have little to no ability to find another job for similar/better terms. Is that the situation for software devs where you’re at?

That may be common circumstances where a union becomes the only viable option for the workers, but unions have additional benefits that something like it would greatly benefit the software industry.

In particular, it's the assignment of work to the union and then the union is responsible for pairing workers with the assignments which enables the union to create a training funnel where different requirements of the same job can be split among different workers of varying seniority such that apprentices are able to work on the easier items even when there are things beyond their skill involved in the overall work assigned to the union.

Typically a union does primarily exist to create CBAs for wages but this is another function of them which I think would be very helpful for SE and future protection.

So maybe not a traditional union is necessary, but I think there are some functions more or less exclusive to unions right now that would be beneficial to apply to SE. Hopefully that makes sense

While we're gatekeeping, how about "Software Developer Apprentice"? This stuff isn't technically engineering.

God help us. It's not his fault, to be clear, but God help us.

The problem is the dogmatism of it all. If you point to a simpler and a more obvious solution, your coworkers will ridicule you and turn you into an old man pariah.

Tell me about it. I had a lot of trouble in job interviews last year.

I slapped my forehead when I was reading a thread about HTMX and someone asked. "How can you send HTML to the browser without JavaScript?"

Yep... yep.

It's not React's fault but the ignorance of the average React dev never stops surprising me. From using divs for buttons or links to this.

Yeah modern JavaScript frameworks heavily discourage semantic markup, and I’m salty about it.

Svelte must be an exception to that rule because semantic html is a first-class citizen.

react-native-web

I think a big part of the problem is how online education and bootcamps/college degrees for web-dev are structured. Often times people are so overwhelmed with the stack they are supposed to learn that quite obvious and important stuff gets lost. People just try things out until it works without understanding the underlying structure. If you come from a simpler MVC framework like Rails or Laravel, it enables you to focus on the really important stuff first, and explore from there. It is also much more rewarding to see some solid results early.

Yeah the issue is that beginners are not learning web dev or even front end, they are learning React.

Reminds me of the joke about, "Omg, that's amazing, the new iPhone will support voicechat ... and you can use your phone number as your screenname!"

A joke made even funnier by being true (FaceTime Audio)