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No field reinvents itself as frequently as software.


That's only true if if you consider SWE as "learning a JS framework".

The core methods and principles of SWE are almost timeless, other things are well documented and can be learned on the go.


It's extremely difficult to communicate this to a team exclusively populated by those who do not have cross-language experience.

As an anecdote, and not to boast: I have occasionally had to write data visualization and function plotting software at least a half a dozen times in as many languages and frameworks, from QuickBasic as a teenage hobby, to C in DOS, Java (Swing and JavaFX), OpenGL, WebGL, JS with charting libraries, Linux raw framebuffer... Also tweaked MRTG charts back in the day, wrote a super basic 3D editor in highschool for games I never ended up making, etc.

A team I was on once had to add a simple chart to a webapp. When the task came up in meetings and was causing the dev assigned the task some grief, I mentioned that I've had to do some charting work before, and offered to help with any details if they got stuck. Instead of saying something like, "Ok, I'll let you know if I have any questions," they said, "Yeah, but was it D3?"




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