Should you learn the newest Language or Framework as a fresh graduate?
TL;DR: Are you joining a startup and love to iron out bugs, yes. Do you want to join a corporation and earn premium money? Stick with the oldest technology you can handle and get paid for being a Relic-Hunter.
Edit: Mid 2021 I had an interview for a position to code with Win Forms, released in 2002.
Towards the end of my computer science education, I started asking around something along the line of: “Should I code my own content management system to prove my skills or may I stick with WordPress?”
Back then nobody could answer this question adequately or be too busy earning money and swimming in cash. Wild times before Bootstrap and co streamlined Web Design.
My programming skillset just out of university:
- Tutor for Java / C++
- Basics of PHP (WordPress, Contao CMS, Drupal)
- HTML4 / CSS3 (JavaScript to a minimal extent)
- OpenGL and Shader programming
- C# (Unity3D)
My first job was at a start-up, boy was that a ride! All the possibilities to prove my skills with all the technology! What I actually ended up doing was using a framework Kendo UI and trying to bend it to my will, because as long as you use these frameworks as the developer intended, you are fine. Beware stepping outside the line, doing so spirals you into a hellish nightmare of “why didn’t they think of it” and “how can I fix it without breaking everything else”?
Besides off C#, HTML and CSS, all my skills were gathering dust.
But the next one will be better, right? Wrong! I had to use ASP.NET and a mammoth of a “framework” named Kentico. It was built on WebForms and some of the projects I had to touch were not even compatible with their own versions, it is still a premium price framework with fees starting at 8999€ / year. The full potential of the framework wasn’t even needed for most of the clients, a simple WordPress site would have been more than enough.
Again: Basic knowledge of C#, HTML and CSS was enough, because fanciness was not on the table, just conveyor belt development.
The next step was a company using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), in 2018! Yes, that’s right W-P-F, first release on November 21, 2006. It was a beautiful step towards creating windows Apps somewhat similar to the web, where markup and design are separated, they even had a pretty solid GUI prototyping tool. Well, all of this doesn’t help if the devs before you just don’t use it with the argument of “who uses GUIs for creating GUIs anyway?”
I had to unlearn everything “comfortable” about layouting on the web and embrace cooking a sour soup with rotten ingredients.
Requirements: Basics of C# and a decade-old technology, but there was a compiler to warn you about problems before it blew up, Yay (I guess).
The first real modern application of my career used a mix of Angular, Material Design and Java on the server-side, tied together with the usual node mumbo jumbo. At least on the surface, it looked like Material Design.
Don’t sweat about the newest stuff unless you are at a startup and begin from scratch, your first jobs will be likely maintenance of decade-old ongoing projects. If you are lucky you are forced to code new projects but using the same old stack others use in the same company.
Learn how the computer is doing it and adopt the dialect (technology stack) to use according to the need. Being good at layouting with CSS without Bootstrap gives you an edge to understand other frameworks because they grew on the same soil just a few meters apart.
You earn the most money by doing things nobody wants to do, like coding in COBOL or juggling memory allocation in C on Internet-Of-Things platforms with a system as fast as a GameBoy.
