Meredith Matthews @braindouche@qoto.org
Joined Nov 2022
RT @SawyerMerritt
NEWS: Tesla fired dozens of employees Wednesday at its plant in Buffalo, New York, one day after Autopilot workers at the facility announced a union campaign.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-16/tesla-tsla-fires-unionizing-workers-after-labor-campaign-complaint-alleges?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business#xj4y7vzkg
I really want to use the has:() selector! I can't find any good use cases yet! Someone get me a really gnarly legacy app and a truculent pm!
You know, my job is actually pretty great right now. I get to completely dictate the technology and direction of front-end engineering and ux, in a way that will probably spread to the entire company. I also am currently deferring almost all decisions because I still don't have requirements for the first project, and I don't know what the scope of anything will actually be until someone figures out what we're going to actually make, because I'm a goddamn adult and refuse to magic up busywork for my team. Finally, I plan on using the simplest, boringest technology I can possibly get away with because this company has tried not doing that and it wasn't pretty.
I will enact my vision and it will load fast and small and accessibly and reproducibly and I will not be stopped.
And in my secret heart of hearts I really wish someone would just tell me what to do here. This is scary.
@betsythemuffin
Definitely something to think about. Though I would say that while my presentation is quite butch, I've never found it made me less conspicuous in any particular way. Being a big fat person also is a factor that's hard to measure!
I wish you luck in chemistry! Thats super cool.
Meredith Matthews
boosted
I should probably do more and thorough research and turn this article into a talk and pitch it to React/Vue/JS, etc. confs.
https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2023/single-page-applications-criticism/
Meredith Matthews
boosted
@slightlyoff @braindouche In Amsterdam we have this weird combination of a single company that does JS consultancy, JS recruitment (their origin) and conference organization at once, all for “the community”. Complicating and inflating things must really pay off on all sides for them. Some evidence was collected over at https://twitter.com/RecruitersConf
Meredith Matthews
boosted
@braindouche @betsythemuffin @jalcine @whalecoiner Not at all.
It's phrased in terms of retention (what's measurable is what's valued), and the observation is that teams that are already more diverse retain diverse talent at a higher rate.
@betsythemuffin
I do not recommend 20%, that's the bad place where you start getting asked to bring the birthday cakes.
And I wonder what makes the difference between our experiences as the only one? That seems like a deeper and more personal conversation than might be strictly appropriate on mastodon.
@slightlyoff
You're kidding. Really?
@betsythemuffin @jalcine @whalecoiner
@betsythemuffin
Yeah, but that's not just in tech, that's basically all the jobs. But tech is worse. But also weirdly consistently inconsistent? Have you experienced this? If I'm the only woman on the team, it's fine. If the team is half not-white-men, it's fine. If the not's make up, like, 15-25% or so, it's a complete trash fire.
@slightlyoff
Nah, go for it. "The rest of us" have been chewing on this bone since the 90's. Assemble some beta readers and have at, or platform some voices you think need hearing and take a few pages from Scott Hanselman. Maybe they'll listen to you. Can't hurt.
@betsythemuffin @jalcine @whalecoiner
Meredith Matthews
boosted
@betsythemuffin @braindouche @jalcine I'm angry about it because I know what the JS-sligners got paid, for worse results, after they convinced these companies to "manage out" people who actually knew how browsers worked.
@slightlyoff
When I started my web development career 8 million years ago in the days before jQuery, my first big superhero consultant move was to swing in and delete all your JavaScript, because it didn't do anything useful and was ALWAYS BROKEN, and I made a lot of money doing this. Ironically, somehow, deleting your JavaScript is still how I make myself look good to this day.
@betsythemuffin @jalcine
Meredith Matthews
boosted
@slightlyoff @jalcine @braindouche
Continue to feel a lot of this was due to (mostly men) who wanted to distance themselves from the girly stench of HTML and CSS via "real" programming.
I suppose they at least succeeded in inflating FE salaries as a result. Arguably a win.
The bizarre 2-4 year period where that crowd absolutely obsessed over purity and monads in their JS code only underlines my thinks there... FP is as "hardcore" as it gets to a certain personality type.
Meredith Matthews
boosted
@slightlyoff @jalcine @braindouche @whalecoiner
As a lady-shaped person who entered the industry via frontend pre-Bootstrap...... I can think of exactly one and a half people I know who fit those demographic criteria and who aren't ragefully perma-bitter about the dynamic. The one and a half exceptions are still rageful but like the JS community.
Perhaps not a terribly visible demographic to... a certain kind of developer. But one that had similar traumatic experiences as that type rose.
@betsythemuffin
Absolutely. Those of us who were there know damn right well that the pipeline for hiring women devs has always been through learning html/css/js, vsb and fsking PHP as part of a non-technical job. 30-something admins and office managers! What do we know, right?
@slightlyoff @jalcine @whalecoiner
@betsythemuffin
To an extent, yes absolutely, but also I personally think that prejudice is secondary to the sheer scale of the recruitment problem that web 2.0 presented. That recruitment problem was solved, by and large, by making front end development work a lot more like back end development, specifically java. Which is a wildly simplified way to describe it, but that's what happened.
@slightlyoff @jalcine
@slightlyoff
Good point. You did not get to see how the react sausage was made.
@jalcine
@slightlyoff
The result, after ten years, is we are stuck idolizing workflows that cannot distinguish between fundamental and incidental complexity, that completely misunderstand the platform they run on, that struggle to reinvent bad wheels better, and prioritize the developer over *everything*. The modern web experience was invented with no adults in the room.
@jalcine
@slightlyoff
It may have been an accidental side effect of valley priorities, but all of front end has been dragged backwards away from systematic maturity by their absolute love affair with jr developer clever codemonkey enthusiasm
@jalcine
Joined Nov 2022
