I finally argued with a senior dev about when to learn frameworks vs fundamentals

I had a debate with my coworker at lunch last Friday. He said beginners should jump straight into React because that's what jobs want, but I think you need to understand vanilla JavaScript first or you're just guessing. He showed me his portfolio site built entirely with three frameworks and it looked great, but when I asked him to explain how the DOM works under the hood he kind of froze up. It hit different because I realized there's no right answer, it depends on what kind of coder you want to be. Do you think starting with frameworks sets people up for faster jobs or does it make them weaker in the long run?

3 comments

3 Comments

ryan36924d ago

Right? The house on sand thing is exactly right. I watched a new guy at a meetup try to explain a React bug and he didn't even know how event bubbling works. He was just slapping onClick handlers everywhere hoping something stuck. It was painful. Another kid I know spent three months grinding through a React bootcamp, gets a job, and two weeks in they ask him to write a simple filter function in plain JS. Couldn't do it. Had to copy paste from Stack Overflow. That's not a developer, that's a framework user.

emery19924d ago

Frameworks without fundamentals is like building a house on sand.

mark_mitchell24d ago

Wait, are you seriously saying you've seen people skip the basics and jump straight into React or Angular? That's wild to me @emery199. Those are the same folks crying on Stack Overflow a week later because they can't figure out why their app won't even render.