That’s becoming hard to fathom when you can now get hired as a React developer with about 3 years experience for $170k without any understanding of how things work under the hood.
Why would a React developer (and hopefully SME, if they've been at it for 3 years) need to know anything "under the hood" to earn their value?
I work on compilers for a living, but I couldn't build an IC if you put me in front of an EUV machine. Does that mean that I don't have an understanding of how things work "under the hood"?
"under the hood" can go arbitrarily deep; nobody thinks everyone needs a deep understanding of the quantum physics governing how a transistor works to build a web app.
But in my experience, people saying "under the hood" are using it with respect to the level of abstraction they are working with. There's a major inflection point in effectiveness when you go "one level deeper", or understand how the tools you are directly using are implemented, even though there are certainly many layers of abstractions below those tools. It helps a ton with debugging and performance work, and you start to really understand the limitations of your toolchain.
“Under the hood” is fancy talk for doing more than put text on screen. Whether or not that’s needed depends on the employer.
BTW, nobody is an expert within just 3 years. That is a key indicator of a Dunning-Kruger moment that becomes clear by drilling down just a bit into key performance indicators from research and experience.
> “Under the hood” is fancy talk for doing more than put text on screen. Whether or not that’s needed depends on the employer.
This isn't a satisfying explanation, since "putting text on the screen" can be a pretty complicated task. My limited understanding of web development is that the conceptual model is actually a decent bit more complicated than non-web-developers give credit, and React seems like a prime (if somewhat self-inflicted) example of that.
A trivial example of someone being an expert in 3 years is being the original creator of a thing. Time is a sufficient factor, but I don't think it's a necessary one (and we acknowledge this implicitly by acknowledging that people learn at different rates).
As a web developer I can promise that putting text on the screen is not complicated, though shops tend to find a way to bury themselves in abstractions and bad decisions that anything can become impossibly complicated and take 10+ seconds to execute.
As the creator of a once extremely popular productivity tool I can firmly attest that being the creator of such tool is not a sufficient qualifier to elevate one to “expert” of the given problem space provided just 3 years time.
It’s easier to understand when you look at profits per employee at the major tech firms. Google, Facebook and Apple generate over $1M in profit per employee. From what I can tell, Software is the highest value/employee industry in the world.
Even weirder thought is that how many of these are even actually needed? The amount of new fundamentally market changing products form these companies seem to be limited...
Or is it just keeping them away from new competitors. Or just general games of corporate fiefdom and team sizes?
