A lot of frontend teams are very convinced that rewriting their frontend will lead to the promised land. And I am the bearer of bad tidings.

If you are building a product that you hope has longevity, your frontend framework is the least interesting technical decision for you to make. And all of the time you spend arguing about it is wasted energy.

I will die on this hill.

If your product is still around in 5 years, you’re doing great and you should feel successful. But guess what? Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. That’s just how the frontend community has been operating, and I don’t expect it to change soon. Even the popular frameworks that are still around are completely different. Because change is the name of the game. So they’re gonna rewrite their shit too and just give it a new version number.

Product teams that are smart are getting off the treadmill. Whatever framework you currently have, start investing in getting to know it deeply. Learn the tools until they are not an impediment to your progress. That’s the only option. Replacing it with a shiny new tool is a trap.

I also wanna give a piece of candid advice to engineers who are searching for jobs. If you feel strongly about what framework you want to use, please make that a criteria for your job search. Please stop walking into teams and derailing everything by trying to convince them to switch from framework X to your framework of choice. It’s really annoying and tremendously costly.

I always have to start with the cynical take. It’s just how I am. But I do want to talk about what I think should be happening instead.

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.

Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run. I believe if you stick closer to core web technologies, you’ll be better able to hire capable engineers in the future without them convincing you they can’t do work without rewriting millions of lines of code.

And if you’re an engineer, you will be able to retain much higher market value over time if you dig into and understand core web technologies. I was here before react, and I’ll be here after it dies. You may trade some job marketability today. But it does a lot more for career longevity than trying to learn every new thing that gets popular. And you see how quickly they discarded us when the market turned anyway. Knowing certain tech won’t save you from those realities.

I couldn’t speak this candidly about this stuff when I held a management role. People can’t help but question my motivations and whatever agenda I may be pushing. Either that or I get into a lot of trouble with my internal team because they think I’m talking about them. But this is just what I’ve seen play out after doing this for 20+ years. And I feel like we need to be able to speak plainly.

This has been brewing in my head for a long time. The frontend ecosystem is kind of broken right now. And it’s frustrating to me for a few different reasons. New developers are having an extremely hard time learning enough skills to be gainfully employed. They are drowning in this complex garbage and feeling really disheartened. As a result, companies are finding it more difficult to do basic hiring. The bar is so high just to get a regular dev job. And everybody loses.

What’s even worse is that I believe a lot of this energy is wasted. 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.

On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it’s a big part of why we’re seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can’t. They are trying and failing because the tools being recommended to them are just not approachable enough. And at the same time, they’re being convinced that learning fundamentals is a waste of time because it’s so different from what everybody is talking about.

I guess I want to close by stating my biases. I’m a web guy. I’ve been bullish on the web for 20+ years, and I will continue to be. I think it is an extremely capable and unique platform for delivering software. And it has only gotten better over time while retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility. The underlying tools we have are dope now. But our current framework layer is working against the grain instead of embracing the platform.

This is from a recent thread I wrote on mastodon. Reproduced with only light editing.