Comment by austincheney

> Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free

True, but irrelevant. I have written an OS GUI, including full file system support, in the browser that performs faster than native OS GUIs. My biggest learning from this is talking about performance in a job interview is the fastest way to kill the interview. Performance, like security, requires trade offs that deviate from comfort. If the common developer is insecure comfort is the only thing that matters.

JS hiring expects the following: React components, 2-6 weeks of JS practice, the ability to use map/filter on arrays, and CSS. If you overshoot that you begin to enter unknown territory that intimidates other developers. The better you are the less employable you become as the further from the bell curve you drift.

If you are wondering why this is or how we got here the answer is trust, or the lack thereof. In software there is a long standing bias: if you can see it visually its worth less. I have been doing this work for more than 20 years and that bias predates my work, so its been around for a while. Bias is continuously reinforced by the lack of standards in software hiring and the inability of employers to train their employees.

This lack of trust means that employers do not trust their employees to perform original work and likewise the developers don't trust each other. This is why absolutely everything, I mean this literally, is a downloaded NPM package, because the developers will trust an anonymous stranger to write original code before they trust anyone they know. There is all kinds of excuses to qualify this, of which some are bizarre and nearly all lack any kind of merit.

This is why its irrelevant what the browsers provide. Its baked into the framework, an NPM package, or ignored.