Have you ever came across the unpleasant feeling of being forced to learn something you are not fully a fan of, cause you simply did not have another choice?
The reasons for this might vary, including specific job opportunities in your area, particular work culture in some organizations, or jumping into some continuous legacy projects...
Did you try to present some alternatives and how it all resolved?
Oldest comments (39)
Yes. I was forced to learn JQuery just to implement it on a frontend project to use for a very short time. My stubbornness almost gets myself trouble in career. My perfectionist has both good and the bad. It depends on who would appreciate it.
The funny thing, when it comes to jQuery, is that some people believe it's fully extinct. In fact, there are loads of jQuery code still out there, as well as organizations still maintaining it π StackOverFlow Survey 2020 approves, based on 65k devs. π
In reality, JQuery won't go away that easily in a few decades I believe. Not every company wants to refactor new by using the latest stack if the application still working fine.
Exactly my thoughts ππ―
Mendix, it's a low-code platform but I found it to be quite restrictive based on the database driven approach. I no longer work for that company :D
It just got too much for you at one point, right ππ
All the time, I am an Database Engineer for a large Corp, many of the tools defined in the "strategic" direction I do not nessesarily agree that they are the best fit, but its above my paygrade I just need to make the tools fit with what I want to do.
Have you ever tried to open the discussion for alternatives, or you basically find it as a fight against windmills in a large corp? π¬
Yea I've had discussions about alternatives before, problem always comes down to money, mostly when alterntives are presented the deal may already have been done with vendor X and multiple millions already changed hands.
Does my entire High School career count? haha
Hahah, made my day ππ
I missed my high school life...
Visual Basic for Applications, to fix some code in several Excel spreadsheets that had been deprecated a looong time ago but suddenly needed again...
I didn't really learn VBA, just enough to be able to fix the problems and implement a few new things. While there's nothing inherently wrong with VBA, it's cumbersome to work with if you're used to more modern languages π and error handling can be clunky (
On Error GoTo ...).Excel is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear VBA π Have scratched a surface very little too when wrote some simple productivity scripts π
In my living country, VBA is still a thing for some very old factory or manufacturer that hasn't been exposed to modern technology. Usually, a developer who could do VBA is very senior, the pay is higher than any modern backend developer.
+1 ... I was forced to migrate a billing system to VBA to .NET
I was forced to learn VB6 and SQL Server 2000 when the only language I was capable of was FoxPro 2.6 for DOS. :)
About two years ago, I was forced to turn to web dev that needed a lot of learning after I didn't find job vacancy for desktop non-web anymore.
I'm always curious how even the oldest of tech ticks, so I don't know if I've ever felt like I was being 'forced' to learn or that it was unpleasant. There are certainly features of C# I miss when doing VBA, or things in F# I'd like PHP to be able to do, or TypeScript features that make Classic ASP feel clunky, but I also respect the crufty crustiness of the old guard - especially if has made the company millions of dollars (which in my experience, these old bits of tech often have!).
ClojureScript.
I remember being impressed with it, but I had a very hard time with code readability.
I had to learn some proprietary internal frontend framework that felt like the worst angular and react had to offer mashed up into some poorly implemented (think fixed pixel values for components...) mutant child. I started delearning the moment I got an offer to move on.
Yes. They are Wordpress and Drupal. So weird to code them.
I used to love Drupal. I even met Dries Buytaert! But the lack of backwards compatibility between versions constantly meant significant rewrites to code which really wasn't viable for the small business clients I was working with. You really had to put clients on a maintenance plan (so ok from a business stream perspective) if you used that.
And wordpress... man... the number of people who still ask me to update wordpress websites because they can't do it themselves - I'd rather just convert their website to HTML and get rid of the wordpress headache.
They (the client) might break the wordpress itself carelessly, I prefer to version it using composer like Roots Bedrock version.
Ah... because of money, I had to learn programming stuffs. I wish I would still have time to relearn Physics, multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Electrical Circuits, Thermodynamics, Control Engineering... I have eBooks on these subjects, but time and energy preclude me from doing that.