Comment by austin-cheney
4 hours ago
We could have replaced tons of developers if only employers were selective in their hiring and invested in training. Instead there are a ton of hardly marginal developers in employment.
Case in point: web frameworks as mentioned in the article. These frameworks do not exist to increase productivity for either the developer or the employer. They exist to mitigate training and lower the bar so the employer has a wider pool of candidates to select from.
I disagree. A good framework makes code more maintainable, and makes it so you can focus on what’s important or unique to your product. It certainly makes you faster.
That depends on what you are comparing against. If a given developer is incapable of writing an application without a framework then they will certainly be more productive with a framework.
It’s like a bulldozer is certainly faster than a wheelchair, but somebody else might find them both slow.
Eh. I’ve written plenty of applications by hand before there were good frameworks— win32 apps, old school web applications, “modern” SPA-like apps before there was a React. I’m more productive with React + Tailwind than I was with anything (other than maybe VB6). Being able to reason about your UI as a (mostly) pure function of state is powerful. It reminds me of the simplicity of game development— with a proper rendering layer, your developers can focus mostly on modeling their problem rather than UI complexities.