How can I 'sell' React to a workplace of dinosaur devs who hate javascript?
I work at a very large and old company where for various reasons, they're always at least 10 years behind on tech. Until a few years ago, their UIs were all in Java Swing, now they're trying to move to ExtJS. It's hell. Nobody has any motivation to improve their products, everyone is miserable and struggling with the awful tech, including me. It's like they don't know there are better options and refuse to look for them. I don't get it.
I can quit, but I kinda want to just see if I can make any impact at all. How can I make my miserable, uninspired, dinosaur colleagues see the benefits of JavaScript, TS, etc.? They're currently in the mindset where they see something slightly unusual like
() => {} and just mentally check out. It's infuriating.
I'm probably the newest person there, and it's hard to be taken seriously when the next youngest person on my team is twice my age. Idk what replies I'm expecting, I guess I just wanted to rant.24 Replies
try to get buyin for a small project
if you cant, leave
If arrow functions scare them there are bigger issues lol
Without more detail I would just agree with @cje
at my current job i build a lil app they estimated to 2 months in 1 week
that got their attention
@cje should have taken all 2 months š
Vacation
Jk, but what was the app?
basically just the perfect demo for tanstack query
complex invalidation logic etc
would be hell to write imperatively
Ah nice I gotta learn that someday
Only have used SWR because Iāve heard itās simpler
And works well for what I need I guess so far
Honestly this is most likely, but yeah I'll see if I can get them to let me do something small. I've been so tempted to spend a day on a weekend rewriting one of their frontends in React but idk if I'm that committed
Half of the problem is that they are so tight on security. Everything has to be self hosted and offline, they're behind a ridiculous proxy, and they do everything they can to have packages go through their own artifactory. Idk how you reason with management that insists on this kind of thing.
The only thing keeping me there is the value I'd get out of teaching them, if they did decide to pick it up.
Anyway this was kinda just a rant I guess. I had to write it somewhere because nobody at work is gonna listen š
Sounds you work for a bank, if this is not a bank or a datacenter (I doubt a datacenter would have such an old tech) I would run as fast as possible.
If it is a bank, it might take a lot of flexing to convince them, but worth a try.
You also need to look at who you work with, they might not be willing to change because they would have to learn something new. If this is the case and you want to grow, you know what the answer is
Itās not a bank, but they do have reasons for the security so itās not completely misguided, just naive. Iāll probably give it a few weeks and if nothing changes Iāll quit.
Idk if any of you have had experience with ExtJS, but Iām surprised my keyboard is still in one piece
Sounds like react isnāt the problem here?
It's the thing which I'm trying to convince them to use. The original point of the question was supposed to be 'how can I frame React to make it appealing to a team who are stuck in old ways'. I got side-tracked.
Because I know it will make my team a lot more productive once they come around to it. Maybe I shouldn't care so much.
Devil advocate hereā¦do you? If your team is lacking the experience in react do you think this will be the case?
Iāve seen some devs move to react and be worse in a way
The self hosting stuff is pretty standard in corps
Security is important
Iād recommend quantifying ābeing productiveā
Honestly, yes. It has taken us almost 2 months to create a web page with a table that updates on websocket events.
Also can I say, this is a fantastic learning opportunity. Convincing others of a certain idea is a very valuable engineering skill. So even if it doesnāt go your way, try and get as much learnings out of it as you can
That's the main reason I'm sticking around
Build it in react and show it off, and see what they say. Iāve seen a lot of newer engineers come into a team and conflate the team ānot wanting the new technologyā with actual serious reasons for not wanting it.
To be more specific, have you read accelerate?
Yeah I've been pretty careful to not come across like I'm just mindlessly complaining because "old thing == bad", but I think because of my relative juniority they just expect that behaviour by default.
No, but I've heard good things and have a long train journey tomorrow, so thanks for the reminder lol
This sounds reasonable to me, unfortunately itās something that, as a junior, you need to overcome
If theyāre older, they likely read books, so read accelerate and use it as ammunition
Itās the most important software book of the last decade
I went to a conference in 2018 and that book came up in 3 talks by very respected people in the industry. Also a lot of aws conferences that year were pretty much summed up as āread accelerate lolā
Final thing, make sure itās solving a business problem and also consider the context of the company. If thereās another fire at your company theyāre not gonna care about this tech change.
This whole experience has been wild though, I've learned more in the last week just thinking about putting this argument forward than I have probably in the previous 2 years.
I'm pretty sure it is. Not only are they paying a license fee to use a shitty framework, it was shitty at the peak of its popularity 10 years ago and they spend weeks training every new dev to use it themselves, because there is no educational content.
Thatās great!
Oooo, that means you can put a money value on it, however seee if it comes with any support
Companies love throwing money at support
(And for good reason)
It does, but nobody uses it for some reason, ironically.
But yeah, going from support to no support is one of the reasons they're unsure. I just remind them that their entire product line is built on spring boot and they've never needed support for that.
Anyway, thank you. Just bought accelerate š
You weight your options yourself obviously, and never take advise from a random dude on the internet like me, just a disclaimer š
I did use ExtJs, about 10 years ago, they were transitioning to Sencha back then, at the time it looked like a pretty solid framework/component library. I haven't seen it since so hard to say what has changed
Update, it worked š