Most if not all C# roles I see these days demand Angular / React experience. It's really hard to talk confidently about that unless having actually done it; you'll get picked apart / walked by. And it had better be covered by Jasmine / Karma as well, and using Typescript. In the cloud. Etc.
Thus we have Resume Driven Development - for better, or worse. As an older person (I got my Vic 20 when I was about 10), I find it equal parts inspiring and frustrating. Having a family / child it's nearly impossible to devote anywhere as much time to this as the younger, unencumbered ones must have. Yet I still love the new stuff.
React is fun and simple, makes juniors look senior for a bit, until apps get complex. Sr react devs build even further complex abstractions due to the nature.
Angular development is reliable. You know what you're getting and what comes with senior development.
(Ive moved 2 prototype projects that needed to scale from React to Angular).
maybe people enjoy working with it .. I love it, I went from a systems admin/customer support to being a senior react dev, I learned angular, than some javascript, than some programming and then some more and some more.
I've been doing Angular front end development exclusively since 1.1 days (now on 12) and last couple of years I get the feeling this might negatively affect my future job prospects. The framework does the job just fine, of course it has certain long standing issues (boilerplate, mandatory host component, non-strict forms, hierarchical injectors), but you eventually learn how to live with these or work around. All the jobs seem to default to React nowadays and require prior experience, limiting the employer choice. Now, if an experienced developer wanted to join the team I'm at, I'd vouch for them even if they never touched Angular, but am not sure what other companies share my sentiment.
we're a c# shop too. 7 developers. we started with angular 1. we too got caught in the angular 2 mess but we stayed with it. we know react but after you add routing, redux, forms, etc to react, you've got something close to angular.
i just updated a medium sized angular 4 app to angular 5 with no problems. typescript has been our saving grace especially when you're collaborating code with your team. we've really come to enjoy angular. if you're migrating from angularjs it can be difficult but if your developing a new app with form validation, routing, redux then i would recommend angular.
A year ago I was applying for jobs (react jobs mostly) and got a take home project with angular. I shrugged and said why not? I stared at the angular docs for about 2 hours and emailed the recruiter saying “no thanks”. Angular is such a departure from anything I’ve used before. Meanwhile react is just simply component based and if you need things like global state you can add zustand and it all just makes sense. Angular felt like a ton of boilerplate (kinda like class-based react but so much more) and I just couldn’t imagine writing code in it daily.
Later on I got a job in react with typescript and serverless functions and it’s a dream.
My full-time job involves Angular, and I have to agree. I tried React briefly, and it was much easier because I didn't have to deal with understanding how the internals worked.
I worked with React almost exclusively for ~5 years. I got so fed up with everyone reinventing the wheel on every project, coming to Angular (late) was a massive breath of fresh air. I now spend more time building valuable features rather than discussing changing state management libraries and people banging on about hooks all day long. YMMV, and I'm certainly in the minority, but I'd probably choose Angular over React for any new projects now, personal or professional. The only thing I really miss is that JSX is much more ergonomic and the devtools for React are a bit better.
I'm just saying a lot of people specialize in stuff that's not very transferrable.
I disagree about Angular being transferrable to React, really they take very different approaches to frontend development and reading React code of a Angular dev that just started with React is full of non-idiomatic code (seen first hand when migrating one project from AngularJS to React and getting the existing team to start porting)
It seems to me like we disagree on the role of senior developer - in my view senior developer is still an individual contributor and not a manager - sure you support junior staff, but you're the guy they go for technical stuff, reviews, better approaches - not the other way around. What you're describing sounds more like tech lead/architect role to me.
> Yes. Why didn't you stick with something?
Options available at the time, boredom with projects I was working on, generally liking to learn new stuff. A mistake in retrospective, but I'm transitioning away from development to a position where the breadth is an advantage.
I completely disagree, at least when it comes to my surroundings.
In 2016, the vast majority of recruitment offers I received were Angular, or jQuery/javascript. And while HN (thankfully) was all about React and whatnot, this situation continued for a good few years. Angular was the safe choice which I guess the PM's wouldn't get fired for. I remember many, many conversations with various recruiters where I told them I refused to do Angular projects, but I'd love to work on a React or even 'vanilla' JS project.
I'd say that after React became 'standard' on HN (around the time Vue popped up I suppose?), it took at least 2 years before I started getting emails and calls from people looking for React work.
Currently hoping this will happen with Elixir but not getting my hopes up :). Still, not having this sword of damocles hanging over my head that 'maybe I should learn Angular' is real nice.
My last three jobs involved Angular. The second-to-last one was a very heavy application in the US healthcare space. Angular was perfect for that app. In conjunction with Rxjs / ngrx it was extremely powerful. I agree the learning curve was… steep. I don’t regret a minute of it. I moved to another company and I’m doing react now. I was actually hired to support the cash cow written in Angular, but now the company moved focus to full react and we are not hiring Angular devs anymore. React is fun though. I really enjoyed doing a deep dive with Hooks, but I would still work with Rxjs if I could
I introduced React (alt as flux implementation) to a C# shop that develops internal tools within a large enterprise. We had one application before in Angular but people seem to like React much more and the uptake has been fast.
DI in Angular 1 feels different than in C# land and is mostly used due to a missing module system. That exists these days and that makes it easier.
Routing is the same. Most modern Angular guides even recommends you routing to directives and pretty much using them as react components to prepare for Angular 2.
But the biggest thing about Angular is that you need to learn tons of things that are NOT familiar to a .NET developer. scope, transclusion, different types of bindings (represented by strings ...), template language etc.
If they are not feeling familiar enough with the web to learn React then I don't think they can create a large angular application without creating a mess either.
Your core skills have been off-shored and automated. I used to have a similar career and the majority of the clients that used to hire me are now serviced by design templates and WYSIWYG editors like squarespace. Every time a new technology platform hits the mainstream it starts the race to the bottom. You have to stay ahead of it; for me the solution was specializing in React and doubling down on product management. I was in a similar position to you a few years ago but I'm back in the low six figures again and not having trouble finding work. I don't have a family though, so I appreciate how that can work against you.
Edit: I wouldn't spend too much time on Angular; I think maybe 1 out of the last 20 recruiter pitches I've had was Angular; the rest were React.
Thus we have Resume Driven Development - for better, or worse. As an older person (I got my Vic 20 when I was about 10), I find it equal parts inspiring and frustrating. Having a family / child it's nearly impossible to devote anywhere as much time to this as the younger, unencumbered ones must have. Yet I still love the new stuff.
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