Back when I first started working as a software engineer no one gave a crap about good code or best practises. Back then it wasn't uncommon for there to be a few dudes maintaining the website of a large household name business with almost no oversight. I remember it being common for someone entirely untechnical to come over to dev desk and ask for some feature, then you'd find the easiest and quickest way to get that thing live.
Skip to today and we have entire engineering teams with hierarchies, specialities, and accountability – and this is true even in smaller companies.
So imagine you're the lead frontend guy at some company... Are you honestly going to say, "well the site's requirements are kinda simple, so we can probably just build it in HTML and vanilla JS"?
There was a period several years ago where frontend guys writing HTML/CSS and some JQuery were lesser regarded than Java and C# devs. It's why I always pitched myself as a backend guy who knew HTML & JS. But then we got Node, React and TypeScript... Now frontends are so complicated that if you want someone with enough experience to understand how any of it works you need to pay them a decent salary for their knowledge.
Engineers have to over-engineer to look smart.
Back when I first started working as a software engineer no one gave a crap about good code or best practises. Back then it wasn't uncommon for there to be a few dudes maintaining the website of a large household name business with almost no oversight. I remember it being common for someone entirely untechnical to come over to dev desk and ask for some feature, then you'd find the easiest and quickest way to get that thing live.
Skip to today and we have entire engineering teams with hierarchies, specialities, and accountability – and this is true even in smaller companies.
So imagine you're the lead frontend guy at some company... Are you honestly going to say, "well the site's requirements are kinda simple, so we can probably just build it in HTML and vanilla JS"?
There was a period several years ago where frontend guys writing HTML/CSS and some JQuery were lesser regarded than Java and C# devs. It's why I always pitched myself as a backend guy who knew HTML & JS. But then we got Node, React and TypeScript... Now frontends are so complicated that if you want someone with enough experience to understand how any of it works you need to pay them a decent salary for their knowledge.