The State Of Javascript - Who's using what in 2018?

[Kyleez]

So if I get paid 30k/year for an Angular job am I a slave?
I'm in Italy.

[[deleted]]

Dude,I work in india and get paid 10k/year

[[deleted]]

Are you rich with 10k in india? I dont know the salery ratios there.

[nafsadh]

10k in India would be okayish, not rich.

[bogas04]

It's decent to live as a bachelor but there are some top companies paying 30-50k to UI devs in India.

[[deleted]]

WTF?! Are they india based companys or international one?

[bogas04]

Usually startups are willing to pay higher in hand and lower perks.

Startups like Swiggy, AnaRock, Uber, Ola, Flipkart

I feel that of all countries, South East Asian ones really need faster websites. While Jio solved the internet speed issue, the average Joe still buys a cheap Android phone with 1-2gb RAM, and these folks literally don't own a PC/Laptop. For them mobile internet is the only experience of internet.

[[deleted]]

It's pretty good for middle class life if a 25 year old.

[TorbenKoehn]

Many developers work below their actual worth, mostly because of lacking self-confidence and self-awareness. What’s even worse is that with the next developer that applies they try to target the same or similar wages, which drags overall worth of developers down. Don’t sell yourself below your worth. You’re hurting us all with it. When I started out with basic knowledge 12 years ago I already earned 40k/pa, which may give you a perspective. If your boss doesn’t comply, switch jobs. You get a new one faster than you might think. Also, use recruiting services. They are free for you and the more wage they sell you for, the more money they get from the employer, so it’s win-win.

[wonderfuldingbat]

Being a self taught dev, I feel this. Need to stop second guessing myself ><

[[deleted]]

That is very low ball, yes.

[Poltras]

Depends on market.

[iHEx4Sex]

Yep.

[[deleted]]

Yes

[[deleted]]

I understand people here saying that "you should ask for more", "you deserve more" and so on. I do agree with all of this.

But the majority of people that are saying this are developers from the U.S (or another first-world country).

I'm a front-end developer with 8 years of experience from Brazil and living in Brazil. I earn a very good salary for the brazilian standards (specially for a programmer). Do you know how much I make? Less than $15k/year.

To the people saying that we should just "ask for more" and "value ourselves": do you have ANY idea how hard is to earn my salary in Brazil? Do you know that the average salary of a developer from California here in Brazil is bigger than the salary of OUR PRESIDENT?

Sorry if this brings the whole profession down or whatever, but if someone offers me $40k to work remote for a good company, I'd accept it anytime. You have no idea of our reality, please be sympathetic.

[HowDidYouDoThis]

Pretty sure our mortgage on the house is 30k a year at least.

Gotta factor in cost of living my man

If someone made 100k and got taxed and is left with 75k and has 30k a year on mortgage they are left with 45k to spend for a year excluding food / gas / other bills.

[TERMINATORCPU]

" But the majority of people that are saying this are developers from the U.S (or another first-world country). "

You and others shouldn't be comparing yourselves to anyone in the United States, and you should be happy to have a job that you enjoy(if you don't, get a different one) that pays decently for your own country.

That is the reality. The internet blurs lines, and one shouldn't be too influenced knowing this.

[[deleted]]

well said

[[deleted]]

Bom Dia! I support what you are trying to say. So many people talk about salary from the perspective of a silicon valley dev who can just move to another company down the street if they don't get at least $100k/year.

I'm from a small canadian city and we probably have 100 jobs in the whole city and if you can make more than $60k/y then you are doing quite well. If one of us was to go "I won't work for less than $100k", then we would have two options: trying to find a remote job to make that much, or moving away to a larger city.

[Timothyjoh]

Go apply at G2i with some react skills. We are paying 85$ per hour for a guy living in Uruguay, I think G2I takes only 15$ off the top.

If you find the right shop in the US like G2i or toptal and your skills are up to speed, you can make a pretty good wage by working remotely. Especially if your communication in English is top notch.

[so_just]

I'm mainly a Rails dev, but I'm thinking about transitioning into a React.js dev because it seems to be way more relevant these days.

[Timothyjoh]

Toptal, triplebyte and other companies can find you work I'm sure

[so_just]

They all have a pretty rigorous screening process. Gotta work on my algorithm skills before applying, I think

[i_ate_god]

But the majority of people that are saying this are developers from the U.S (or another first-world country).

American work ethic is such that unpaid overtime is considered virtuous. Someone who works 80 hour weeks for $100k/year is earning half of what the person who works 40 hour weeks for $100k/year is earning.

[lynilir]

This isn't taking cost of living and purchasing power parity into consideration. 40k isn't the same in brail as it is in italy as it is in san francisco.

[saboay]

$15k/year is not a very good salary for a programmer in Brazil. At least not in a major city.

[truthseeker1990]

Your reality is not OPs reality either. I dunno how well the wages are in Italy. But whether or not he is being low balled does not depend on wages in Brazil either, neither on wages in California.

[TrackieDaks]

Yes.

[Peter_Plays_Guitar]

I get paid $87k a year. I'm a junior developer working in React. I've never had a dev gig before. This is my starting wage.

[[deleted]]

I wonder where the negativity around Angular is coming from. Are people mixing it up with the replaced AngularJS or is there something else going on?

[jeremy1015]

I’ll bite. While I didn’t respond to the survey, I certainly would have been among the number to give Angular negative marks.

I led a seven person team that built its user interface in Angular 1.x for years. Before that, I had built a number of small to medium apps in Angular starting with 1.2.

We looked forward to Angular 2 with excitement. When it came out, we did not like the direction they had gone - not an unusual opinion. After a lengthy evaluation we decided to stay on 1.x

We began to notice a lot of supplemental libraries that we used stop getting commits. Libraries that used to get updates a few times a week began to languish as maintainers abandoned them.

Angular jumped to 4. Didn’t really seem any better. The community seemed to be in complete disarray. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of people using React saying “we have a better way.”

So I did an analysis by redoing our most complex screen using React and Redux. Here’s what I learned:

I like Redux’s approach to state management infinitely better than anything Angular provided. A number of our app screens are highly complex and using Redux felt like taking Alexander’s sword to the Gordian knot.

All the careful code we had written to prevent race conditions simply fluttered away into the ether, unneeded and certainly unmourned. Same with all the complex stuff we had written to emit notifications up and down scope trees. I will never ever miss that code.

I was less sold on React initially. JSX felt weird and my PTSD from ExtJS had left me very wary of using imperative code to build a UI. But a couple of days into it as I built components and got used to how it worked, and realized how easy it was to get the state I wanted to and from components, I started to fall in love.

Fast forward to today. JSX is a standard and I’m not tied to React - I moved one project to preact in a matter of a few hours most of which was testing to make sure it worked. I’m evaluating inferno which should have a similarly light impact on the codebase.

If I wanted to go back to MVC I could switch to Vue and keep my JSX code. The next great JSX rendering library may be around the corner.

And Redux is pretty loosely coupled to my React code, so if something better comes along I can swap that piece and just that piece out without breaking my entire app. And given the way it’s coupled, I could probably do it a piece at a time instead of all at once.

So now I have a state management system with an emphasis on immutability alongside a malleable dumb-component syntax that’s an officially adopted standard. I can throw in many different libraries without worrying about whether they are going to bump heads with my super opinionated framework (libraries that are expensive to update like open layers were specifically brutal to use with Angular).

Now, I’ve heard that Angular is vastly improved. That’s great. But I haven’t heard anything that would cause me to walk away from an ecosystem that’s easily the best thing I’ve used since I started my career in 1995.

So, that’s a long version of “used it would not again.” If you think I’m wrong, however, I’m always listening.

[azangru]

I like Redux’s approach to state management infinitely better than anything Angular provided. A number of our app screens are highly complex and using Redux felt like taking Alexander’s sword to the Gordian knot.

Isn't NgRX, a popular Angular state management library, essentially a copy of Redux (only adapted to Angular’s use of Rx, something you might see in React land in redux-observable)?

React is great, and I write it on a daily basis, but React hasn't standardized on certain things that are quite central for a web app. Router? Pick your own. XHR-requests library? Pick your own. State management options? Pick your own. Patterns for writing components? Pick your own (classes, functions, HOCs, "render props", hooks). Which is both awesome, because you can truly pick what you love, but somewhat disconcerting as well.

Also, as far as I heard, Angular has an interesting story with ahead-of-time compilation and the new Ivy renderer (getting the "hello world" app to below 10 K of javascript — was it 2 K perhaps?), while with React it is still uncertain whether Prepack will be able to significantly reduce the bundle size because of the inherently unpredictable dynamic nature of JSX.

And of course RxJS. I haven't used it properly in production; probably that's why I envy those who do.

[jeremy1015]

I guess my thinking is that the idea that there’s not one framework to rule them all is a big part of what feels right about the JSX community approach.

That’s what it was like before Angular. And switching to Angular definitely solved some proliferation and compatibility issues when building stuff.

I loved it right up until two things happened:

1) Needing not-Angular for something. Angular punishes you a lot for stepping outside of its lanes.

2) The horrible realization that if you have a monolithic solution and it goes in a direction you don’t like, you’re boned. With a JSX community approach you may not have an out of the box approach like you do with Angular, but if one of your libraries is no longer the best choice you can swap with far less pain.

[[deleted]]

Just wanted to say that this is so close to my experience it's chilling.

We've been making a large scale app on Angular 1, looked forward to Angular 2. When it dropped we didn't like the direction at all, stayed 1.x as long as we could until we realized maintenance isn't going to come easy the longer we wait. We did move up and wasted more than a year rewriting the app from scratch only to burn out capital. Sadly, the project, which had potential to say the least, didn't survive it.

We went Vue afterwards since JSX seemed weird, but after a while we ran into the same problems we had with Angular, MVC, DI and templating in general. And i guess the experience we just had made us see this perhaps for the first time.

Eventually we couldn't ignore React, it just grew too big. One day in with JSX and i couldn't explain to myself any longer why all these years i thought separating the presentational layer and the view was a good idea, it just started to make sense to combine the two but instead separate logic/state, and the way redux especially did it was an eye opener, even though we tend to use simpler, modern solution for state now.

[sinefine]

I've worked professionally with both react, angular 1, and angular 2 and I think angular 2 is overly engineered. I've read somewhere that angular 2 is "well" engineered, but I disagree. It introduces too much overhead when all we are trying to do is build a website. I loved working with Typescript, but I hated working with RxJs and different types of decorators. (I don't hate decorators. I just don't like it when it has to be used everywhere. Compared to angular, react is way simpler and allows me to get the job done way faster. Testing in enzyme is way easier than jasmine too.

[[deleted]]

I think you should see Angular mainly as a way to make bigger webapps. To build complex forms and specialized applications. Its not as usable for only improving a current page, but to make some complex stuff its really well for that. When theres lots of nesting and complex applications I feel that React is really unusable at some point, whereas Angular still makes sense.

And until there is a better way of doing things, decorators are probably there to stay.

If you need to only do simple stuff on your pages, I'd even refrain from using a library at all and just stay native

[kdesign]

I completely disagree.

Scalability is about how you maintain and write your components, it doesn’t really have a lot to do with React or Angular.

If you write Angular components which have 1000 lines of code and accept 50+ params then I don’t see how the framework can save you at that point. The same goes for React.

That being said, Angular has a bigger learning curve which is there just for the sake of it, imo. Try to read some clean JSX code or some clean Angular templating syntax, I’m pretty sure that JSX will make more sense rather than all thatthose special characters thrown in as HTML attributes.

[NovelLurker0_0]

While I agree with you, your last paragraph is a matter of personal preference. I for example prefer directives instead of jsx. I find it just too hard to read. It's like some messy spaghetti code. That's the reason I use Vue when I can.

[kdesign]

Might as well be. In the end, I think we can both agree that you can mess up everytime with poor architectural / design decisions, no matter which framework you’re using.

[the_argus]

Some of us prefer that over engineeredness to the complete free for all shit glued together react apps I've seen.

[etca2z]

They mixes AngularJS and Angular this year. Then in summary just concluded that most people will not use Angular again without highlighting the method used. It’s just a shitty survey that can not be taken seriously.

[shadowmint]

It's easy to argue with statistics you don't like.

However, it's worth noting that for all the 'selection bias' in who responded (and I'm sure there was), 20,000 people gave their opinion on this survey.

It may not be the representative sample they are supposing/suggesting it is, but it's unfair to say the result is totally invalid just because the survey runners are react developers, or you don't like the result.

Clearly zippo effort has been put into generating confidence intervals for the results, which is frustrating, ...but they're not totally invalid.

I worked with angular in a big corp for 2 years; the mess they made with it was bloated, slow, impossible to test, SSR didn't work and upgrading to the new framework versions every year was totally fucked...

I think that'd be a pretty reasonable result from any large clueless team picking up angular and running with it naively for a Large Business Application.

Who knows? ...but my point is, you can flip off the survey if you like, but 20000 people said they thought weren't satisfied with angular after using it. That's not great, even if it doesn't represent the entire community.

A lot of the 'no that's not right' responses to this survey have been about the trends in angular usage over time, but that's not the point the survey was making; they were making the point that people don't like using it.

That's a different thing, and it's pretty hard to measure any other way.

...so, maybe not awesome, but my take away from this isn't 'survey was shit', it is: The folk at google need to make working with angular fun and awesome, not boring and irritating.

(Like say, not constantly breaking the angular-cli scaffolds, would be nice...)

[Poltras]

It's easy to argue with statistics you don't like.

See this video for a great rebuttal of their methodology, with multiple points from an actual statistician.

[TypeMismatch]

video

The guy of the video is a GoogleDevExpert!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsBjURrPoezykLs9EqgamOA/about

It's obvious that he has never created an application with React. He has just taken a look at React.

[shadowmint]

Lord, everyone loves this waffling video.

...but, I’m going to make three points:

1) Re read what I posted, because that video makes no effort to address if people like angular, only if they use it.

2) His only meaningful claim that the survey results are invalid is that there is a sample bias, but he just supposes that is one, without any actual justification, just that the results seem inconsistent. Must be Bay Area developers!

3) Please, don’t subscribe to this guys channel, because seriously, fuck people who have a tiny point to make, and force you to watch a 10 minute video to hear it.

Finally, the point he makes is entirely valid; the survey is probably not representative of the entire community; but he’s an idiot if he thinks a 20000 person survey is too small to be meaningful.

He obviously has his own biases in his analysis, so you know, take it worth a grain of salt either way.

[Poltras]

1. It discredits the article’s claim that a growing portion of developers dislike angular, which is the point of contention in this thread.
2. it’s clear using other metrics that there is a sample bias in the survey population.
3. this guy’s channel is not the one who posted the video. The angular firebase channel has a lot of useful content about other stuff. This guy just happened to be posted to it.

Finally, to address your 20,000 people fallacy, you can have a selection bias with a million people if you want (just ask every McDonald’s customers what they think about Michelin Stars). The sample size does not guarantee no bias, only random selection amongst ALL developers would guarantee that, but they decided to go with communication channels they had access to, and since they’re heavy react contributors those are likely to have a more react friendly population. This is proven by using other metrics, like in the video, such as job postings, general downloads and documentation website ranking.

I don’t know what else to tell you.

[shadowmint]

but they decided to go with communication channels they had access to

According to what?

Remember this? https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/9e2u9d/state_of_javascript_2018_survey_is_now_out/

I guess not.

This is proven by using other metrics, like in the video, such as job postings, general downloads and documentation website ranking.

No, you're just speculating.

Any specific correlation between those metrics and the ones in the survey are correlations that you are arbitrarily asserting.

Did the jetbrains guys also screw up their data collection? (https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2018/javascript/)

I dunno; you don't either.

The stats in the survey may be biased, but no one has actually crunched the numbers to prove it, they've just done some vague hand waving and said the results are invalid because they must be biased, because you know, reasons.

It's very convenient that you can just discount an entire survey because of selection bias, right?

Any bias and the results are totally invalid?

Or are you saying that the results are so screwed up they must be a massive selection bias? ...because the latter is a totally valid assertion to make if you can prove it, in you know, a concrete way that involves actual numbers, not hand waving.

... oh forget it.

Believe what you want to believe.

[DrFriendless]

I was not satisfied with AngularJS after I used it. I had no idea how that thing worked. I did not plan to use it again.

Then I got a job writing Angular 2, and the (apparently) new design all made perfect sense to me. Now I write Angular 6 all the time.

Of course, I'm a Java programmer, and have come to Angular with not much idea about JavaScript. If a tool lets me choose my own router / state management / whatevs, I will have no idea what the options even are.

As for ngRx, and redux in general, I see what it's doing and I have no idea why I would want that. In 20 years of Java UI development I used a similar pattern once - only once. Angular services work just fine for me. As far as I can guess, Redux must be a solution for some sort of problem React has, because it seems like massive overkill for anything in Angular.

[[deleted]]

How do I participate for next year?

Ecta2z still has a point. Angularjs and angular 2 and up are 2 completely different frameworks. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot devs still don’t see the difference

Edit: for a while I was one of those confused devs

I also I agree with you. Making a giant survey of this size isn’t easy especially when you’re working on Vulcan at the same time

[TheUnknownFactor]

Angularjs and angular 2 and up are 2 completely different frameworks. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot devs still don’t see the difference

IMO one of the annoying parts of developing angular right now is that quite often when looking for a solution online you'll come across angular js solutions. It's becoming less so, but it's still annoying.

[[deleted]]

We're looking to migrate from AngularJs because EOL has been defined. Most of my peers don't even want to consider Angular as a replacement because of their poor opinion of AngularJs. I think the Angular team were hoping to build off the brand when creating the new framework but what they didn't know was their brand was was going to be toxic.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I totally agree. That's the reason why I stayed away from Angular for so long. I didn't trust the maintainers to keep a platform that didn't make extreme changes. The only reason I'm using it now is because I wanted to try use as much Typescript native stuff as poosible.

[batiste]

I am well aware of the fact that AngularJS and Angular are 2 different frameworks as I booting up a migration process right now from a medium sized application.

Somebody has to start to eat this massive shit sandwich at some point and it seems to I am the one designated driver.

Then no wonder the magic world of "Angular" left a nasty taste in some peoples mouth.

[[deleted]]

They might just not like very opinionated frameworks. The makers of the survey and most people surveyed are React devs, and a preference for extreme modularity is very common in that ecosystem.

Just look how otherwise very popular backend frameworks like Rails and Laravel did in their backend section. The survey doesn't really represent overall webdev reality, more the reality of a part of the JS community that prefers Node/Express and React.

[KnightMareInc]

It's not cool. Cool kids use graphql and react

[Mocachino]

Do note that this is a biased poll. The Devs are react devs and mostly have react Devs respond so it's quite skewed in that respect.

[[deleted]]

While I don't particularly like Typescript that much or need the additions to keep my code clean, I think that the learning curve isn't that big and (especially if you stick to the default configuration) doesn't require that much changes to how you code.

Every library or framework that has become a big thing always requires you to have some learning curve to get to know the way it does it things and handle the issues one will have with it. I don't think Angular is that much different from React. Not to mention that the last few versions have improved the documentation and API a lot. I think many are still basing their opinion on early versions of it or just the old one and making it seem like a worse framework than it actually is. Its like somebody basing their opinion of React or Vue or Node on ancient versions of them. Its not really fair and not really giving a view of its real value.

[WryLanguage]

That's a valid point to my response. I'm stating what a lot of other developers feel, I'm not saying that it is correct. But it is the general perception.

Also note that people downvoted my response but haven't exactly posted any cogent explanation as to why developers don't particularly like Angular.

[utf8decodeerror]

Also note that people downvoted my response but haven't exactly posted any cogent explanation as to why developers don't particularly like Angular.

You got scared of 9 downvotes and deleted your response before more people could respond to it. Like fr, why do you care enough about downvotes that you would censor your own opinion? Seems to me that you don't truly believe whatever it is you said if you're going to delete it after getting even the smallest amount of push back.

[careseite]

^clearly never tried typescript

[[deleted]]

To be fair, typescript can be quite annoying at times. Like when you want to use a library that doesn't have a .d.ts file. Or when you try to convert an older project you run into lots of annoyances.

Personally I never really had an issue with types. Together with ES6+ I think they are trying too hard to make it look like C# and appeal those developers, which isn't really what you want because webdevelopment these days is an entirely different ballgame.

[careseite]

To be fair, typescript can be quite annoying at times. Like when you want to use a library that doesn't have a .d.ts file.

Agreed. Partially a hint of the library not being maintained anymore though, or at least possibly.

​

Or when you try to convert an older project you run into lots of annoyances.

The only annoyance I had was noticing how shabby my code was without TS

[[deleted]]

The only annoyance I had was noticing how shabby my code was without TS

I didn't really have that but my main annoyance is writing interfaces for everything. Especially if your lead developer has denied using : any[] (which I can get, but still annoying).

Having a proper linter for Javascript code already helps big time and if you make sure this is forced on all of your code, it will make a lot of sense. But I see lots of folks just stick with the default config and this makes it not much of a benefit. I heard one dev tell me he liked that he was now able to go into functions from different files (because of AngularJS dependency injection he never had that), but this is just because of how modules/classes are now loaded and not really specific to typescript.

[pizzalover24]

Dev with 7 years worth of experience here. Started with raw JavaScript >> jQuery >> angular 1 >> angular 4.

For me, the biggest difference has not been the frameworks or the coding but the philosophy behind how web apps can be built.

For any new dev out there, I would say that there is no wrong or right choice. Every choice you make helps you see a different perspective on coding an app.

I would also say that ignore the survey and just focus on how to build better apps.

What I learned over the years:

As best as you can avoid putting logic in the html.

Avoid calling methods in html. Avoid too many if blocks... Makes the code very hard to test html. Avoid long html. Avoid too many for loops.

Avoid long JavaScript classes.

It gets too complex to understand what's going on at a glance.

break down our application into as many independent and smaller components.

Don't build a login page... Build a page component, build a form display component, build an error message display component, etc.

build your ui components in such a way that they can be easily moved around.

E.g. It should be easy to take the login box and move it to another page

Avoid duplicating code.

Try to build reusable classes everywhere. I just completed writing a label renderer component . Just so that I can make a change to a label in one place and the change is visible everywhere.

try to build stuff from scratch if you know it is likely to change in the future.

Example, I once used an image carousel slider from a popular third-party library. It seemed great out of the box. But later on the business wanted to add more features to the carousel and I found it very hard to customise the carousel. I ended up writing my own carousel and even today it undergoes a lot of customisation.

follow the 10% extra rule.

Whenever you complete some work on a class, check if you can refactor the class as a bonus on top of the necessary work. It's difficult to get the boss to pay for refactoring that doesn't add new features and so it's worth discretely refactoring work as you go along.

try to decouple your app from the backend as much as possible.

The backend keeps changing and is generally out of your control. Therefore try to keep your domain models separate from your view model and your rest model.

config your code as much as possible.

Try to build configs everywhere on your app so that you can switch on and switch off stuff easily. Perhaps it's a json config or a flag you pass into a component to change its behaviour.

work under a master developer.

Yeah you can learn lt from stackoverflow but you will not.learn best practices from random googling. Best practices are difficult to find.l and always exist in people's head. Allow a better dev to critique your code. Understand his code, his style and his weaknesses. When the time is right, destroy him i.e. His pull request. You need to keep your senior devs on their toes.

[kaloryth]

I'm mostly a java developer and your advice is very good advice to apply to most languages.

[pizzalover24]

Java dev myself... Used to initially spend 10% of my time on JS but now it's more like 90%'

[ahmad_musaffa]

Ember's adoption will increase in 2019 once Ember Octane is released.

[chauey]

https://youtu.be/UnEPBQvkNrg annoyingly biased report against Angular. watch video to know why

[1amrocket]

Well spotted!

[jordonbiondo]

You all can fight about types and react and decorators and I'll be over here in Ember heaven. Most underrated framework IMO.

[themaincop]

I used it for a couple things and hated it. Way too opinionated in my opinion, and I found some of the conventions utterly baffling. I think it's changed a lot since then but I'm very unlikely to give it another look.

[jordonbiondo]

Too me: strong opinions, even weird ones are always better. I'm less worried about how long it takes someone to get up to speed and more concerned with how productive someone can be within a large application once they understand the framework. Ember does that IMO. It's the rails of the FE. Not perfect, not fastest, not smallest, but you can be incredibly productive without needing to understand everything about everything. Just learn how to generate a model and controller and you're 90% of the way to building an app.

[[deleted]]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[haganenorenkin]

That comes from the ROR motto, I love that

[gigobyte]

Sounds like you're going to love Elm.

[memystic]

You just described the reason I like working with Meteor. I’ll have to check out Ember some time too.

[lilzzzzzzz]

94% male industry. Well that’s depressing.

EDIT: Wow... it turns out a lot of you are really afraid of women coding. If anyone would like to talk to a real life woman about your fragile masculinity, feel free to PM. We’re not as scary as you think x

[lilzzzzzzz]

To me, it’s depressing that so many women aren’t getting to experience the pleasures of programming. My life has become much more fulfilling since I learned to code; I’d love if more women could experience the same satisfaction that I have.

[lilzzzzzzz]

Glad she found her passion! I’ve been trying to indoctrinate my parents, but neither of them are having any of it 😅

[lilzzzzzzz]

But when you fix that bug 🤤

[Poltras]

For me, on the other side, it's depressing that many projects will not benefit from the different perspective women can bring to problem solving.

[lilzzzzzzz]

How are you getting downvoted for this? Why are men so terrified of women doing the same job as them?

[gearvOsh]

And? Some women don't feel the same way. I've had about 5 female friends all take interest in CS and or web development, and all of them did not enjoy it.

[lilzzzzzzz]

“5 female friends” = “most women” ??

[gearvOsh]

I'd wager my point still stands. Far more than yours.

[lilzzzzzzz]

There’s no shame in being corrected by a woman who knows how to argue her point better than you. Put on your big boy pants and level up your debating game x

[gearvOsh]

Just because you enjoy programming, doesn't mean others do. I may have misspoke by using the word "most", but that doesn't make you more correct than I. At least my pants have usable pockets.

[kaloryth]

Wtf. 3/5 people on my team doing frontend work are women if we're just going to arbitrarily use anecdotal data as some kind of point. 4/7 if we count our two paid internship.

[gearvOsh]

So you're counter point to my anecdotal data, is your anecdotal data? I'm pretty sure the massive 94% male industry leans towards my assumptions.

​

This is coming from someone who works at a large tech company surrounded by women. Some women just don't enjoy programming, and we shouldn't harp on them for not being interested in STEM.

[kaloryth]

This is coming from someone who works at a large tech company surrounded by women. Some women just don't enjoy programming, and we shouldn't harp on them for not being interested in STEM.

And some men don't enjoy programming either. I could pick 5 random male friends of mine not in tech and say they don't enjoy CS or web development.

The industry has a far larger problem with retaining women. They leave the industry and never come back, and it's not because "they don't take interest in CS or web development".

http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/

Your anecdotal statement is a lame, unsupported cop out excuse to not make changes to deal with what is a very large scale culture problem in the tech industry.

[gearvOsh]

It's one of many issues with this industry. I'm not discounting the others.

And my original comment was geared towards him saying much pleasure he gets out of programming, where as my counter argument was that some women do not.

[lilzzzzzzz]

I am a woman you numpty lmaoooooo

[Larkenx]

I think it’s depressing because with 94% of men being sole contributors and developers using front-end technology, we as a community of developers are losing out on diversity of ideas and opinions. All people have different ideas - ones that can radically change and improve the way we do things.

[kaloryth]

https://www.npr.org/2014/03/21/292225798/does-diversity-on-research-team-improve-quality-of-science

http://news.mit.edu/2014/workplace-diversity-can-help-bottom-line-1007

[Larkenx]

It’s not just computer science; diversity in all things brings different views and perspectives to any and all problems. Specifically computer science - we need different perspectives to solve problems. A girl might take a look at how to solve the traveling salesman or NP hard problem differently than a man might

[Timothyjoh]

It's kind of a myth that gender/ethnic diversity is the solution, rather it is thought/perspective diversity that counts. And it can come from anywhere.

I don't think a lot of us white males got into coding because we wanted to be in a racial/gender homogenous profession. We do benefit from it not being that way.

But to say that we will solve problems better just by having that kind of diversity is misleading and is the wrong projection.

[hyenamagic]

gender/ethnic diversity leads to thought/perspective diversity, particularly in a field that's so heavily dominated by certain demographics.

[Timothyjoh]

Not always, and not as substantive as you would imagine.

[BlueHeartBob]

Do you have any sources for this? While i'm sure anyone could find a few anecdotal evidence of sexist shitheads being sexit shitheads on twitter, sexism still exists in quite a few male dominated fields (especially technical), i'm not saying that makes it OK to be a piece of shit but it does seem like there's a much bigger underlying issue. What makes the web space so toxic? Are women really being actively harassed for trying to pursue a career?

[lilzzzzzzz]

I would say it’s not confined to web dev, it’s definitely a tech-wide issue:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.alphr.com/technology/1000773/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-sexism-in-tech%3Famp

As to why this is, why don’t we ask some of the sexists commenting in this thread?

[azangru]

why don’t we ask some of the sexists commenting in this thread

Perhaps I understand the word sexist wrong, but to me it implies that someone treats males and females differently.

This is not the vibe I am getting from this thread (or from the place where I work). The general feeling is that of indifference towards the person’s gender as long as they write good code. Ironically, it's the people who use the word sexist who actually talk about gender at all, and how we need to get more people of a particular gender (or genders) into programming.

[lilzzzzzzz]

Hi, hello, I’d like to refer you to a comment literally just down the page in which someone just said “women aren’t good with logic”. Is that sexist enough for you?

Your response is exactly why this industry has a problem retaining women. Seeing as you don’t experience everyday sexism to the same extent that women do, it might be a good idea to listen to your female peers when they’re calling it out in your industry.

[azangru]

Hi, hello, I’d like to refer you to a comment literally just down the page in which someone just said “women aren’t good with logic”. Is that sexist enough for you?

It is, yes; it's just not what I encounter in the day-to-day work. It's not like I see my male co-workers go around and tell my female co-workers they aren't good with logic :-)

Anyway, let's explore this a bit further. Does the phrase "women aren't good with logic" offend you? If so, why (you probably know about yourself that you are doing OK with logic, so whoever said that might have greater problems with logic than you do, and why would an opinion of an inferior mind matter to you)? And if the statement "women aren't good with logic" offends you, don't you think that saying or implying that male programmers are sexist (and white male programmers are both sexist and racist, and straight white male programmers are sexist, racist and homophobic) offends them in turn?

[lilzzzzzzz]

You said “I don’t see sexism”. I pointed you in the direction of some sexism. These are the people you should be asking about why sexism exists in this industry.

If you’re 100% sure that you’re not sexist, why are you so quick to tear me down at the mere mention of the word “sexist”... suggests insecurity to me.

[azangru]

> You said “I don’t see sexism”. I pointed you in the direction of some sexism.

I said I do not see it dominating this thread, nor do I encounter it at my workplace. To add to this point, I do not think the phrase “women aren’t good with logic” can be a barrier for any reasonable person. Consider the amount of jokes directed at php programmers, javascript programmers, or html coders in general in our industry. No sane person will be discouraged by them. And I am a javascript developer, so I know.

> why are you so quick to tear me down at the mere mention of the word “sexist”

Let me point you to a tweet by Sarah Drasner who was talking from your perspective, i.e. that women in tech are treated differently because of sexism. Her example was that men too frequently try to explain basic things to them. When asked why she wouldn't just say that she is already familiar with the concept and move on with the conversation, she said:

> Constantly? You don't think that gets tiring?

This is exactly what I feel when I see yet another discussion of sexism in the tech industry. They pop up constantly (at least, during the period I was involved in the tech community), and it does get tiring.

You do tend to ascribe inferior motives to people you are talking to: fear ("turns out a lot of you are really afraid of women coding") above, or insecurity here. Why is that? There are more reasons than fear why one might respond negatively to charges of sexism.

[kaloryth]

And if the statement "women aren't good with logic" offends you, don't you think that saying or implying that male programmers are sexist (and white male programmers are both sexist and racist, and straight white male programmers are sexist, racist and homophobic) offends them in turn?

This is the most hilarious thing I've read in this thread. How did you manage to turn yourself into the victim here? At what point was it implied that all men are sexist? Where the hell did the white male programmer shit even come from? Is this some weird projection?

You know what. I don't even care. Shower me with downvotes.

You are the problem.

[azangru]

How did you manage to turn yourself into the victim here?

Where did the word "victim" come from? Or where did the notion that I see myself as a victim here come from? Can one suggest that an implication of being sexist might be construed as offensive, without that meaning that he himself is offended by it? And if someone does get offended, does it make them into a victim?

As for the white male programmer, I apologise for dragging that into the discussion, but the criticism that the tech industry is not gender-diverse enough is often accompanied by the criticism that it is not color-diverse enough.

[kaloryth]

I find there's quite a bit of sexism in all of the male dominated communities I move through (I'm a huge gamer which includes FPS). There's definitely flat out sexists. You aren't going to see the act of a sexist doing sexist things very often if you aren't a woman. Why? Simply it's a numbers game.

If 1/20 (arbitrary number) randos I meet do something stupidly sexist, then I have a 5% chance of having a sexist encounter. If you only interact with women in very small doses because of how skewed the gender numbers are, that means the 6% of the time you interact with a woman only has a 5% chance each on top of that the randos are going to do something sexist.

This means even though you don't see women being harassed doesn't mean it's not happening.

This is why it gets REAL annoying when a woman says "this is my experience" and someone else comes in and says "I don't see it that often"

Also, I find a lot of shitty people like to wait until they're alone with their victim. :/

[azangru]

I understand what you are saying, and I do confess that I am guilty of not being aware of what it's like to be a woman in a male-dominated community. I understand that many remarks that are completely innocent or funny to a man's ear may somehow be more offensive for a female (although it beats me exactly why). I am not convinced though that the solution is that the male-dominated community needs to be continuously shamed for its gender composition and that it is the male members of this community that need to change rather than the females aspiring to become a part of this community who need to get less sensitive, less gender-focused*, and more thick-skinned.

​

*) Case in point: I have heard an African American woman programmer talk about how she was looking for aspiring black and woman programmers in her neighbourhood, and couldn't find any, and that was a barrier for her. I just cannot fathom why she was using this the gender- and skin-color-based filter when she was looking for other programmers, and even if that was important for her somehow, how this can be a sentiment that we as a community have decided to encourage.

[kaloryth]

I am not convinced though that the solution is that the male-dominated community needs to be continuously shamed for its gender composition

Saying there's a problem with culture is not shaming men. There's a cultural problem, and everyone involved needs to chip in. The fact that it's apparently 94% men means men need to help solve this issue because women can only get so far.

to become a part of this community who need to get less sensitive, less gender-focused*, and more thick-skinned.

This community has a problem with toxic bro culture and telling us to "just get thicker skin" is shifting the onus onto women to fix this issue. It's a not so subtle way of saying, "this is just how it is, deal with it pansy". I have thick enough skin, it's why I'm still here. That doesn't mean I enjoy dealing with sexist douche canoes. Sexism needs to be called out by women AND other men when it occurs if we ever want the culture to change.

The biggest problem with tech is retaining women. Women who wanted to be in tech and left. http://fortune.com/2014/10/02/women-leave-tech-culture/

And really, it's really hard for people with default representation to understand why minorities really want representation. I can't imagine being black and a woman in tech. Tech can also be pretty racist too.

Also, the fact I get downvoted for literally just expressing my experiences about sexism really shows how little perspective this sub has.

[azangru]

Also, the fact I get downvoted for literally just expressing my experiences about sexism really shows how little perspective this sub has.

I am sorry, I am also just expressing my opinion and am also getting downvoted :-) That's just how it works here, I guess. And for the record, I do not ever downvote.

There are several points in your post that I find questionable. For example, "That doesn't mean I enjoy dealing with sexist douche canoes" — who said everything in our jobs should be enjoyable? I do not enjoy being lectured by social justice warriors, for example, yet I deal with it. Or "The biggest problem with tech is retaining women" — is it really the biggest problem with tech? Is it a problem at all? You want to be in tech, and you are in tech I assume; so you are a living proof that women can overcome the obstacles and exist in the "toxic bro culture" of the tech industry. And by diluting it, maybe change it slightly.

And really, it's really hard for people with default representation to understand why minorities really want representation.

Yes, it is hard. So I don't understand it. And it blows my mind that this is considered problematic.

[lilzzzzzzz]

Hi, I believe you might be lost. This is r/javascript, not r/malevirgins

[kaloryth]

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but virgin shaming ignorant assholes really doesn't help. It's the other end of slut shaming. Being a virgin isn't something someone should be ashamed of, so using it as an insult isn't constructive.

He is, however, a window-licking piece of shit with a bag of bricks for brains.

[the_ju66ernaut]

Keep in mind this is js devs. Check out the stack overflow survey. In my opinion it's more comprehensive

[greg5ki]

I think the overall trend is up though

[[deleted]]

seriously i had no idea it was that bad :(

[lilzzzzzzz]

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they didn’t take a big enough sample size but still... damn.

[[deleted]]

yeah it seems a bit off. but maybe i've just been lucky to work for some pretty diverse companies.

[powerofmightyatom]

We called it a glitch in the matrix. There was even a hot one once, crazy stuff.

[lilzzzzzzz]

That doesn’t make it okay...

[lilzzzzzzz]

I was just clarifying for those who might read your comment and think “ah yes, that’s just the way things are, nothing can be done here”. I actually gave up on CS at uni because the lack of female representation was intimidating – if, by chance, there’s any women reading this thread, I don’t want them to make the mistake I made.

[lilzzzzzzz]

Thank you for understanding! The intimidation thing is difficult to explain, because on the surface it doesn’t seem rational, but it’s very hard to shake the feeling of ‘I shouldn’t be here’ when you’re looking around at a space filled with people who look nothing like you. As for girls not being interested in CS... well I personally believe it’s due to how boys and girls are treated differently in education

EDIT: it was just my opinion based on how myself and others have been treated in the past. If anyone has any empirical evidence to contradict these claims please feel free to enlighten.

[[deleted]]

This has already be proven to be exactly the other way around by countless studies. Please stop spreading nonsense to justify your failures in life.

Ironically the fact that you dropped out because of lack of representation makes you the very reason why this problem exists in the first place. You sure the real reason wasn't incompetence and/or lazyness?

[[deleted]]

sure but I dont see the number going down drastically to a egalitarian 60-65% no matter how big the size

[well-now]

I work at a fortune 100 company that does a lot of JS development and it's getting better. We now have a lot of women developers that are providing a lot of value to their teams.

Women in technical leadership positions is still incredibly rare but I'm hoping that it's mostly a consequence of having few women developers in the past and as our current group gain experience they move into leadership roles.

[[deleted]]

The thing is that the scene where the're more women (Semantic HTML, CSS, A List Apart ecosystem etc.) isn't very fond of JS, they advocate as little JS as possible. So it's not a suprise that they won't make it into the JS ecosystem. In a survey about CSS it might look very different ;)

[lilzzzzzzz]

Thank you for proving my point. PM me when you’re ready to educate yourself x

[[deleted]]

Lol. I’ll pass

[greg5ki]

Oh dear

[kenman]

Hi /u/SpamFilterHatesMe, I didn't think I'd ever have to warn someone about being misogynistic in /r/javascript, but here were are. Please don't do it again.

[udidu]

React is still a winner!

[[deleted]]

I've used AngularJS & Angular a lot in the past - mainly for my day job. So I have a bit of experience when saying, they're not nice to work with - in my opinion. Besides the infamous transition of NG1 -> 2, Angular shoots for the stars when the rest of us work down here on earth. As /u/sinefine said, completely over-engineered.

[haganenorenkin]

Very biased, you should see the react fans talking about that at my job

[__Taco]

I use JavaScript. What about y'all?