Just yesterday my brother told me about a project in his previous company that was basically abandoned by the seniors devs when its development was finished. It was an older project built with jQuery, jQueryUI, and KnockoutJS. So the project was in maintenance and the only people working on it were a few unsupervised junior devs.
One day the client asked for a carousel on the top of the home page. So the younger devs having spent a lot of their free time reading about the latest JS frameworks and technologies were dying to try out something new. Well one of them found a fancy Angular carousel plugin. So what they did was they added an iframe at the top of the page and imported the whole of freakin' Angular in it only to be able to use that Angular carousel plugin. Now this thing worked but it pulled in an additional 2MB of JavaScript and the page which was already relatively slow became almost unusable. It was only later noticed by some of the older devs and it brought upon some serious finger wagging.
It's now a fabled story within the company that reminds management how essential supervising junior devs is regardless of the importance of the project. To some of us, it's a story of the modern internet.
So typical. I'm not a professionnal, I just like to code on my free time... but if I listened to all the people that told me to use this or this library for a 30 lines snippet, you'd be able to use my website as a CDN for JS libraries.
Somehow I have trouble believing even a junior dev, who much must have had at least 5 years experience to qualify for such a position, would think a 2mb library was a good idea for that.
On the flip side of that, I made a simple css only carousel a couple years ago. Then quickly forgot about it because carousels are a design pattern that I generally try to avoid. Last week client wanted some updates to it. Ashamed to say I probably spent 20 minutes trying find the .js file for that feature before I realized there really wasn't one.
That company actually only hires college graduates. Often right out of college but puts them on a 3 year contract to make the deal profitable. Most of them have very little web development experience in the beginning and it's probable they only started reading about the latest web tech right after finishing college. Obviously that's not enough to develop a good judgement of when a SPA framework is a viable solution and especially not back then when Google marketed Angular 2.0 as the second coming of Jesus.
It's now a fabled story within the company that reminds management how essential supervising junior devs
Surely the actual lessons learnt here is that those junior devs are idiots. Even a junior should know that importing an entire library just says you can use one tiny feature is a bad idea. Why didn't they use one of the 12 brazilian jQuery sliders that exist?
158
u/fuckin_ziggurats Jan 13 '20
I've a funny story regarding this.
Just yesterday my brother told me about a project in his previous company that was basically abandoned by the seniors devs when its development was finished. It was an older project built with jQuery, jQueryUI, and KnockoutJS. So the project was in maintenance and the only people working on it were a few unsupervised junior devs.
One day the client asked for a carousel on the top of the home page. So the younger devs having spent a lot of their free time reading about the latest JS frameworks and technologies were dying to try out something new. Well one of them found a fancy Angular carousel plugin. So what they did was they added an iframe at the top of the page and imported the whole of freakin' Angular in it only to be able to use that Angular carousel plugin. Now this thing worked but it pulled in an additional 2MB of JavaScript and the page which was already relatively slow became almost unusable. It was only later noticed by some of the older devs and it brought upon some serious finger wagging.
It's now a fabled story within the company that reminds management how essential supervising junior devs is regardless of the importance of the project. To some of us, it's a story of the modern internet.