Coping with technology FOMO
This morning, my buddy Avdi Grimm dropped an awesome article on coping with technology FOMO (fear of missing out) that really resonates with a lot of what I’ve been writing about recently…
A lot of developer angst grows from anxiety over technical churn. It shows itself in different ways for different people:
- Personal projects caught in perpetual cycles of framework upgrades; never gaining features, just ported from one shiny tech to the next; or
- …vocal disdain for the “kids and their need for shiny new objects”; or
- …vocal disdain for old fogeys who refuse to keep up; or
- …”We need standardization!”; or
- “…Look at how community X handles this better!”
Then, he offers some advice on what to do. My personal favorite is…
80% of real-world developer work is maintenance. You are more likely to be asked to bone up on an obsolete tech than on a bleeding-edge one. Give up trying to predict the tech you need.
In my experience, most front-end jobs are really focused on React right now (honestly, React is probably old enough that it’s a “legacy” technology now).
But there are still a lot of jobs to be found in PHP and WordPress, working with Ruby or Python, and so on.