And then they said that I had to support IE8! Yes, I know! So of course I didn’t want to work there. I mean I’m not stupid.
That conversation happened at a JavaScript meetup in Stockholm a couple of years ago. Back then the project I was working on had to support IE7. I did not feel stupid.
Fast forward some years and I’m at another meetup. The person on stage talks about how many npm modules they use in their project. They use a lot of things all at the same time. Webpack, Babel, React, Gulp etc.
If you are a modern web developer of course you need to use all of this!
The person states this with confidence while scrolling through the very long package.json-file to show off all the modules. At the time I hardly used anything he mentioned. Was I not a modern web developer?
At a conference. The person on stage talks about the dark years of PHP-development and how they realised that:
PHP is just really stupid programming and everyone who is not stupid should move on to better things
People are laughing. I look around the room. I recognize some of my friends there. Some of them are PHP developers. Really smart people that I look up to. They are not laughing.
Ok, so why do we do this? I’m going to say we because I’m absolutely sure that I’m guilty of this behaviour myself. You find something that you think is a lot better than the thing you worked with before. You want to tell people about it. Fine. But do you need to pass judgement over others? Why not just focus on yourself and your experience? Instead of saying that people using X are stupid you could say something like:
I decided to stop working with X because of reasons and instead I now work with Y because of these things and I feel that it works much better for me.
No judgement. Much better.
Oh and while I’m at it. Don’t use religious references as jokes. As well as it’s not ok to say that people using a certain tech-stack are stupid it’s also not ok to make fun and ridicule people because of their religion.
Have an awesome day everyone!
Great post, Ida!
I see the same behaviour in a lot of diverse areas of life – people switching to a specific diet, discovering a new type of coffee, changing the way they exercise, etc. All of the sudden they *can’t believe* how all those other schmucks can continue their on faulty old ways.
However, these sweeping generalizations are usually a strong sign that the person in front of you doesn’t have enough experience to make any interesting comparisons. But to also draw a sense of superiority from that delusion, yeah, that’s just unnecessary and sad.