A while back, I was interviewed for a role with a company that worked predominantly with NodeJS. I told them I was a novice, & they said that was OK, because they needed someone who could do some project management work, & I had that experience.
Then they asked me to do their NodeJS test. They said I shouldn't spend more than, say, four hours on it.
I learnt enough NodeJS, & a few other bits of infrastructure I'd never heard of, & produced a competent solution for their test - all in under four hours. I even specifically left out the enhancements that I'd thought of for testability & stability, on the basis that I didn't want to press my luck.
To me, NodeJs is still just javascript. It's no silver bullet.
Two things about the situation have worried me since:
- why test someone's competence in a technology that they can learn from scratch in a few hours?
- why insist on recruiting for that skill if you can train someone in a few hours?
I am a Java dev. I can do lots of other things, but Java's been my core language for fifteen years. I've learnt the new features as they've come on board. I've been exposed to a lot of libraries, frameworks, & open source solutions over the years that have allowed me to develop things a lot faster than I used to, because I can leverage the experience of others' in the community.
I am aware that you can probably do the same things in C#/.Net for the same reasons, but have no interest in doing the same things in a different way if they achieve similar results.
What worries me is when someone specifically tries to do one thing in a different way because it's "too hard" to learn how to do it in the current way. If you look at NodeJS as nothing more than a few short-cuts in (server-side) Javascript, then it's really a technology that saves time & effort for a few mundane tasks. Excellent. Move on.
If you think of NodeJs as a revolution because it makes it easy to do those mundane tasks, then you've missed the point of software development in general. NodeJS is a triumph of software development, not a panacea for it. The people who developed it are craftsmen who knew their language (Javascript) & used a lot of experience & skills to solve real world problems in their community.
Only the marketing folk believes that NodeJS solves the problem of world hunger.
A good javascript dev now breathes a sigh of relief when they have to do that boilerplate for web services. A bad javascript dev (or a NodeJS dev qualifying after four hours) thinks that they are God's gift to the software industry because they can replicate some googled examples.
Whatever programming language you develop in, if you learnt it in a matter of days - or even weeks - then you cannot possibly understand why it's useful, or in what context it should be used. Even after you know the limitations, you need to learn how best to use the programming language - through patterns, best practices, software architecture, design, testing, etc.
This is not something you can learn on your own - ever. It is certainly not learnt in a short amount of time. It comes from a lot of commercial experience (where other people are your customer) & teamwork (where other professionals give you feedback).
If you can acquire "skills" that can be learnt sufficiently to pass a test within hours, then why aren't employers taking some responsibility for that training - offering guidance, mentoring, etc - to ensure that the skills proliferate within an organisation, & to encourage learning in the workplace?
If companies appreciate fine craftsmanship in their software deliverables, then why don't they encourage an environment that fosters improving the skills of the developers to make them better at what they were hired to do?
Although all developers should find out about new technologies & play around & learn constantly, they should also learn more about their craft & the technologies that they already claim to be familiar with, with the hope that they will get better, help others to become better, & contribute to the betterment of their organisation.
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