If you want to work for someone else, React is the thing you have to do and have prior, validated, experience in. The only employers not using React but other SPAs (Angular) are the “I want to be cool too” companies pretending to be in the tech sector.
All major SPA’s have had convergent evolution towards the same optimizations implemented in the same ways with similar syntax as well.
If one briefly had an advantage on package size, thats gone now.
If one briefly had an advantage in a DOM manipulation technique, thats gone now.
and I'll have to shift the goalpost toward what I actually think, which is the reality where the theoretical performance of optimizations is undermined by the 100 megabyte analytics package that your users are going to have to load anyway
so while we all played around with page scores to optimize how fast things load to theoretically reduce strain on the server or have less users that bounce, its just so far divorced from the user experience because we'll wind up putting so much extra stuff on our pages anyway
For most applications on most consumer devices, benchmarks comparing the time it takes to update thousands of rows are not really relevant, other considerations will have a stronger impact.
However, the lighter frameworks (where most of the work is done at compile-time and the result is highly optimized vanilla JS) really shine in specialized usecases like underpowered embedded devices, where the more popular frameworks introduce too much latency (>0.5s) for a smooth user experience.[0]
(That being said, it is kind of hilarious to me the world we live in where we're running an entire web browser on an embedded device just so we can use JavaScript to program it.)
> The only employers not using React but other SPAs (Angular) are the “I want to be cool too” companies pretending to be in the tech sector.
I guess that depends on where you are. Here in France Angular usually indicates companies that are a bit more "enterprise" and a bit less "startup". It will often go with a backend in Java or C#. On the other hand, React users tend to have their backend in Python, JS or Ruby. This is not a hard rule of course, but Angular is more like the opposite of cool.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You sound like a really inexperienced engineer, let alone CTO, that has never seen technology trends come and go, and sometimes you bet on the wrong horse.
I'd rather hire an junior React developer than someone with such hubris.
This seems like an outrageous statement on its face. They probably have React on their resume because that is where the job market has drifted. No one is getting hired these days, even at old-school Fortune 500 type companies, for listing "Java-Server-Pages" or "Jinja SSR templates" on their resume for a frontend position.
That was my initial reaction too. Then I realized that every web UI re-write I've seen was lead by developer evangelism, never by management. Developers update their resumes and HR updates hiring reqs accordingly.
This makes it harder to see this as something other than a developer-inflicted problem but for the fact that there are probably three groups of developers affected by this:
a) true-believer evangelists
b) resume-builders
c) innocent bystanders
There's no way to tell from the presence of "Framework X" on a resume where the developer falls between bystander and evangelist. Probably the CTO's point is that they do not like "Framework X", and cases of c) lack judgement and decisiveness for putting up with it?!
Anyway, funny to think about, especially in comparison to the playbook for changing the back-end frameworks.
You need some oversight on your candidate evaluation practices, for the sake of that organization.
Very few of your frontend candidates will be privileged enough to optimize for what you think is relevant. They exchange time for money, you know? Or do you know that.
All major SPA’s have had convergent evolution towards the same optimizations implemented in the same ways with similar syntax as well.
If one briefly had an advantage on package size, thats gone now.
If one briefly had an advantage in a DOM manipulation technique, thats gone now.
And thats that