On a related note, most software is over-engineered. I think it's partly because of centralization of the industry; it's pushing everyone towards a small number of tools for the benefit of a small number of people who control them and so many of these tools end up becoming 'everything tools' and cover more use cases than they should.
Companies want developers to all know the same tools; that way they are easily replaceable across projects and companies and have little bargaining power in the industry. This is why software has a single mainstream trunk and alternative approaches are shunned with no jobs available. The industry is not being allowed to decentralize despite the fact that it naturally 'wants' to.
On the bright side, I think that eventually, some new, far superior non-mainstream approaches are going to materialize and they will erode the mainstream approaches.
Tech is not like math and not even like science; it can support MANY different branches solving any given problem in many different ways.
I agree. In some ways it feels like we have gone backwards in web dev since say the early days of ASP.NET and Rails. Back then we had browser wars to keep is busy. But now browsers are broadly compatible but we have invented all this front end complexity for web apps that often don’t need it.
Stuff like DNS, IP, https can’t be helped as they are fundamental things that need backwards compatibility and are somewhat political too.
I feel that learning those things well is a better investment though than learning the frameworks.
… if I keep going I will start talking about innovation tokens!
You can learn both, though. As much as people like to trash talk it, I think learning from "the bottom up", as long as you remember to follow the 80/20 principle and not go too deep into unnecessary rabbit holes, is still the best approach in terms of long term ROI on your time. I got a degree in EE because I wanted to be a "true" full stack engineer; last year I finally got a chance to learn React and a lot of cockpit flight hours setting Microsoft Azure. It took longer but I feel I'm on much steadier ground to keep climbing up.
Companies want developers to all know the same tools; that way they are easily replaceable across projects and companies and have little bargaining power in the industry. This is why software has a single mainstream trunk and alternative approaches are shunned with no jobs available. The industry is not being allowed to decentralize despite the fact that it naturally 'wants' to.
On the bright side, I think that eventually, some new, far superior non-mainstream approaches are going to materialize and they will erode the mainstream approaches.
Tech is not like math and not even like science; it can support MANY different branches solving any given problem in many different ways.