My Problems Aren’t Professional Enough

A valued colleague of mine recently surprised me with a sentence that I immediately added to my quote database. It has occupied my thoughts so much that I decided to write an article about it.

Here is the quote:

I always look for a solution when I have a problem and don’t try to find problems for a solution…

This somewhat accurately describes what we often observe in the world of frontend development, or rather the opposite: people looking for problems for their solution.

I observe this behavior in the wild and in various forms, particularly among two types of individuals: the fanboys of major JavaScript frameworks and those developers who are always on the lookout for the latest and hippest development tools. Both are searching for a suitable nail for their either well-established and already successful, or brand-new hammer.

The advocates of major known JavaScript frameworks regularly encounter this problem with major updates to their beloved framework. Practices that were preached as best practices for years suddenly become problems that urgently need solving, and, oh wonder!, the latest shiny version of the framework offers a solution to this problem. Unfortunately, it is often overlooked that this problem only existed because one was using that very framework, often primarily to solve a problem from the previous version. And often, the solution looks equally absurd. However, as an outspoken enemy and non-expert of the unnamed framework here, I can never recognize these problems because I don’t have them at all.

I find the second personality, Mr. Supermodern, even more annoying. People who quickly get bored with a running system and are looking for a few milliseconds less build time, more developer experience, or simply some adventure here and there. Often, but not always, these individuals are also advocates of major JavaScript frameworks. However, since the pressure is not as high as with the first sketched problem, the way it is presented is much more insidious. They try to exploit their counterpart’s imposter syndrome.

"What? You don’t have this problem? What kind of backward and unprofessional developer are you?"

Fortunately, this doesn’t happen so offensively, but it resonates in many places. Especially because more tools, more automation, and more dev experience are often equated with more professionalism, or rather conversely: objections against them push one into the corner of backwardness and unprofessionalism.

In truth, introducing a technology into a large team always requires more than just one colleague liking it, successfully testing it in a single project, or a few people having fun with it. Experience and healthy skepticism are much more important. Once introduced, it is often difficult to get rid of it again, causing considerable training effort (and possibly unnecessary growing pains among colleagues) and rarely can be reversed as quickly as initially imagined.