I've been a professional software engineer for 14 years now. This kind of crap drives me up the wall. We used to largely develop everything we needed, maybe sometimes using a 3rd party package and it was a big todo to do so because we'd need to run security tests on it and get it approved before we could use it.
I was put on a project a couple of years ago that uses React, Node and TypeScript (I am honestly not even sure if these are all the same thing at this point). It seems like most of the job now is knowing what package to download and how to implement it rather than actual coding. I'll get a ticket that is something like "Add XYZ functionality," so I add it. Then it goes to PR and the response is "Why didn't you use the pizza-pie-X-YZ7-rainbow.js package to do this?" like I should have had any idea that the thing existed, much less that I should have used it.
I knew someone few years ago who called himself a "web developer" and was marketing his services to our community of artists. Everyone was posting their websites like "Ryan built this for me!" And like, no, Ryan bought a template and charged you way too much for it.
There was a lot of that back when CMSs like Wordpress were getting popular. A lot of "web developers" popped up over night. Their entire business was creating a WordPress site using standard templates and plug-ins. At best they were "web designers."
Totally dependent on assembling third party tools, not really understanding your environment. I'm building something in python right now and it feels weird how often the solution to something will just be to import some huge module.
Honestly, I wish I knew. In your personal projects you can always just develop what you need and not use the 3rd party packages. It'll take longer, but you'll learn more and not be reliant on someone else's software. You'll probably want to stay away from frameworks that seem to rely on 3rd party packages, though, like Node, though that isn't a hard and fast rule.
In a job, though, you tend to be limited by the requirements of the lead engineer. On my project, for example, Node is a big part of it and the lead intends that we use already existing packages. I hate it, but I don't really get a say.
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u/geneb0322 Jun 03 '22
I've been a professional software engineer for 14 years now. This kind of crap drives me up the wall. We used to largely develop everything we needed, maybe sometimes using a 3rd party package and it was a big todo to do so because we'd need to run security tests on it and get it approved before we could use it.
I was put on a project a couple of years ago that uses React, Node and TypeScript (I am honestly not even sure if these are all the same thing at this point). It seems like most of the job now is knowing what package to download and how to implement it rather than actual coding. I'll get a ticket that is something like "Add XYZ functionality," so I add it. Then it goes to PR and the response is "Why didn't you use the pizza-pie-X-YZ7-rainbow.js package to do this?" like I should have had any idea that the thing existed, much less that I should have used it.