Experience can be a bad thing. It is this that makes junior developers such a positive part of any team. Folks from different backgrounds who never learned the bad habits of those that came before them.
By bad habits, I mean little things where I use a certain HTML tag or attribute that you'd only use if you started using it before the other thing existed. These things stick.
To all the code newbies out there, you have a perspective I can't possibly have anymore, and a certain skillset orientation that I will never have. Bring this awareness with confidence into your next job interview.
Geocities is definitely my coding origin story. Folks that came up on Commodore 64 or anything else have their own versions of this. We still bring a lot of value, so don't think of us as dinosaurs, but we need new blood all the time in this industry!
Oldest comments (39)
Huh. This may be one of the few times I don't quite like one of your articles, Ben.
I mean, I get what you're trying to say, sort of.
But you only talk down about experience, instead of showing both sides.
In an industry plagued by ageism and "replace all the experienced people with fresh out of college kids cause they're cheaper", I worry how this post comes across.
I think this comment is tech debt and needs a junior to rewrite it from scratch without guidance.
It appears Ben pumps out micro-content on daily. I can see a positive message. I would just give him the benefit of the doubt that he slapped this one together and he's just working on a time constraint.
One of the things I love most about DEV is that you don't need to post a massive article or blog to have a space to share your thoughts, tips, knowledge, opinions. Let's try and keep it that way!
I certainly don’t think he’s being ageist at all! He is just writing a quick pep post for people entering the industry who may not be very confident (hello 👋 it me).
Saying that, I can completely understand what it must be like to be an industry veteran and see lots of posts geared towards juniors. What Ben has done here is say that newbies have perspective he can’t possibly have - I think that goes both ways. Experienced devs have perspective that I won’t for many years and that’s awesome. I know I have a lot to learn from them and I certainly am not in here thirstily rushing to replace them.
If you feel we’d benefit from hearing an experienced dev’s perspective (I think we would!) and offer yours in a way that doesn’t minimise others’ experiences, then I’m sure tons of people would love to hear it.
I don't think Ben was being ageist.
But the succinctness of this article is basically summed up as "Juniors have a fresh perspective" ((I agree)) "and experienced devs have bad habits that can't be corrected".
Almost a "can't teach old dogs new tricks" and the article itself isn't ageist; but in an industry that is ageist, it feels incomplete to me. That's all.
Though on re-read I can see he's specifically talking about himself and the post is too short to go into detail or his opinion on any of the presented topics in depth, so my initial reaction is definitely overkill.
So I retroactively would rather say: I'd rather see a long form article on what you're feeling/discussing here because the short version is vague enough to have a weird message? Something like that. :)
Ah sorry, I misread “in an industry with ageism” as you saying the post was ageist. My bad! Agree that long form stuff on both sides would be really interesting.
Re: your other reply, Geocities and Angelfire were also where I got my very basic start as a teenager (and Expages too if that’s the third one you’re thinking of?) I sometimes think what my career would be like now had I stuck with it 🤔
Thanks for the note Anthony.
I thought about this when writing it, and I tried not to be ageist. I've always equated ageism with age and a culture of disrespect in that regard rather than experience level per se. Like, if a 45 year old is looking for their first dev job, they might experience ageism due to perhaps not fitting in culturally with a team made up of 25 year olds.
That's just an explanation of my reasoning here, and I'm definitely taking what you said to heart.
Also want to point something else out:
I'm with you on GeoCities (and AngelFire and ... there was one more I can't remember).
Got my start there too honestly and I was building out crappy websites for online RPGs I was playing. And that honestly got me started as a programmer. First with HTML for GeoCities, and then quick quickly into Perl to write my own chat system. I owe my career to those crappy RPG sites I made. :D
EDIT: waves to anyone who remembers RPG chats on WBS/NexusRP back in the day
I agree. Curious when someone will start talking about 'crappy React sites got me started into web dev in the 2010's'.
It's all going to be crap. Looking at React now looks shiny and cool. Looking at it with 2030's view is crap.
What if I think it is crap now? LOL.
Lycos, perhaps? I think I made something on there.
True indeed. Some habits just get stuck with you forever.
Do you have any examples of things you still do that you probably shouldn't? Curious to see what stuck around for you from those days.
Little things like forgetting the
strongtag exists in HTML and always usingbregardless of semantics, or using less useful ways to align items like floats and things because I was doing that before other options came along. I found myself using tables for way to much for way too long too!Some things were easier to shed than others, like using images for rounded corners. Those were easy to never look back on!
Thank CSS for Flex, Grid,
border-radius, and everything else!I'm just here wondering why dev.to doesn't have a guestbook?? What kind of establishment is this?!
You kid, but that's a legit great idea.
Hey, it can either go really well or really wrong. xD
I was more of an Angelfire guy, but I feel ya. I do love Semantic html, and have started using elements like main, article, aside, section, figure, etc...
Dear Ben
Not to fear, you can bring your old school tricks to the future.
npmjs.com/package/react-blink-tag
oh noes....!
New Dev.to PR:
HOC from react-blink-tag and npmjs.com/package/react-marquee to create tags.
I still tend to overuse divs since I started back with HTML4
geocities 🤣
SAME (Geocities was amazing for the time)! bold vs strong, i vs em... I still remember when CSS came out and thinking it was AMAZING... and now I overuse divs and struggle to remember that semantic HTML is a lot more than just arias (article, aside, details... I had to look those up just to remember they are a thing). Fight the old-school fight daily!
I value less experienced engineers because of this. I might have seen 15 different ways that what you're building is going to become spaghetti 6 months from now, but I'll also see a tag, or a function form or something that I just didn't know existed in that code review too. It helps your whole team to be better when you have that mix of experience. I'll help with the structure (and it's important to explain so teammates aren't forced to learn by experience) but they will help with the syntax (and it's important to get the reasoning for using it so I can keep growing as a dev too).
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