Framework Fatigue: The Real Reason Developers Get Angry About New Tech

When people get cross, it's most likely because it's the same old hype cycle in action that has been cycling for the past 40 years:

1. New Thing gets traction, 2. New Thing gets hailed as Next New Thing, 3. Everyone jumps on board and New Thing is The Only Thing you should be using, 4. New Thing Fatigue sets in as various things about New Thing aren't so great after all, 5. Everyone moves on to Next New Thing because maybe that really is the Next New Thing.

Rinse and repeat.

For those who have been in the game for as long as me (I'm not a proper dev but 30 years "doing web stuff" makes me an interested onlooker), it's a fairly tedious cycle to watch come and go over many iterations. It's one of the reasons I try and stick with boring old PHP + HTML + CSS + a sprinkling of JS for the stuff I do.

YMMV but the point is, it's everso tedious and unsettling to those involved trying to figure out what the next thing to focus on should be.

The article comes to this conclusion:

> After years of observing these cycles, I think it comes down to one word: employability.

> Developers want to keep getting paid for what they already know and use. We worry that today’s optional technology will become tomorrow’s job requirement.

However, that's not the real reason for the "fatique" or anger from the seasoned developers. The anger stems from the fact that we've seen all of this so many times before and it seems we're unnecessarily burning cycles on something that is spinned as "innovation", but pragmatically is a distraction.

This anger is further fueled by junior developers jumping directly on the new frameworks and disregarding the "old tech" as some sort of legacy.

This is missing another big reason: we're not just writing this stuff and casting it out into the void, fulfilling weird demands of weird space aliens somewhere. No, much more than producers, we're also - like everyone else - users of software written by others, too.

I don't do much frontend work these days, and when I need something, vanilla JS and CSS serve me just fine. Yet, I get angry or saddened by new things in web space all the time, and yes, sometimes even "offended to the bone that this new generation of developers is just running in circles" - that's because even if I don't work with frontend myself, I will be on the receiving end of all the bloated webshit garbage. Will be, and am - like everyone, I already am drowning in kaka felota.

Take SPAs: yes, they have a place, and frameworks can be used correctly and efficiently. But they mostly aren't, and instead, almost every single website I use - news sites, bank sites, online stores, e-mail services, blogs - they are all now steaming pile of half-broken garbage. Shmaybe they look cuter, and are easier to use with fat fingers on a tiny phone, but they're also less functional than generation before, and take longer to do anything. We've been through couple iterations of SPA-fication, and each one made things worse.

No, the true reason I get angry about new tech, is that new tech is shit, and I'm going to be force-fed that shit, because everything is going digital, everything is being written by juniors, and the market at this stage is structurally unable to make things better, or take feedback. So each time I see a new turd get a spike in popularity, I know that one year for now, I will be suffering at the receiving end of it.

It's not just frameworks.

Every ORM or new database adjacent thingy has to invent a new WhateverQL. Kinda sorta like SQL but not the same (and usually less powerful) so you have to learn its syntax if you want to use it.

And same thing with structured document and each type having their own pathing syntax: xmlpath, jsonpath, css selectors. I was going to write at least yaml is using jsonpath but it got me to this other Thing-du-jour: config file formats.

If you're rejecting someone for having 4 years of Vue.js and you want React experience, well, you're either crippled and close to failure and desperately need to parachute in a JSX slinging ninja to avoid bankruptcy, or, you're hiring for stochastic parrots in human form, as opposed to hiring intelligent developers who can learn what needs to be learned.

I've never been hired for a framework, nor have I ever hired for a framework.

So. Je m'oppose the employability claim.

However, I do get annoyed when everything is gotta be in <X> lang or we're using <Y> tech that is designed for a different use-case, because someone read a few too many whitepapers or blog posts and has chosen a technology because it's new and shiny and hypey, with minimal thought as to whether or not it's actually useful for your given situation.

I'm going to add something that isn't being mentioned here who's impact is underappreciated I think, and that's the idea of developers as craftsmen. Normally when you learn a craft, you eventually reach a sort of mastery, in the old guild system this was a literal title that you acquired.

Once you became a master it's not like things stood still, you were constantly refining your techniques and innovating; but something I've noticed about master craftsmen is that they are extremely conservative in their tools.

Even if they know that theoretically a new tool would allow them to do something with greater ease, they have already put in the time to learn to do that thing with the tooling they have, and they understand that, if they are ever considering adopting a new tool, the tradeoff has to be immensely in its favour.

Often they will adapt the tools they've already spent perhaps decades using, rather than a completely foreign tool. They build a deep mental and physical model of how these things work, and it allows them both a social prestige in demonstrating their ability to do something that others can't with the same tools, and clarity of purpose to not spend their time constantly overwriting their prior knowledge.

You can see this in programming with, for instance, really serious C programmers, who've had decades to internalise the craft and to this day can do anything they need to with C89, or particularly C99.

I think that humans have an inherent need to acquire this feeling of mastery over a domain. Consciously or not, I think webdevelopers have their morale sapped by the constant demand that they relearn how to do the most basic parts of their craft with entirely new tools every few years. Because of this cycle, they are robbed of both the inherent fulfillment of truly learning a craft, and the social prestige that comes with it. That's why it's so irksome to have the newly minted college graduate pushing these new shiny things constantly, it undermines the opportunity to experience gaining true mastery of the domain, both in terms of having to constantly relearn new skills, and in destroying any social prestige which comes with what little deep knowledge of "legacy" systems the developer has accumulated through practicing their craft.

This situation runs totally counter to the human spirit in my estimation.

There is one glaring omission IMHO: documentation, or to be precise its quality.

It happens way too often that even the "latest" version of the documentation (assuming it exists) contains code that outright does not compile, does not work or yields deprecation warnings. I get the motto is "move fast and break things", okay, but at least don't make me curse at you while trying to get started on your project.

Also, when you introduce breaking changes or deprecate something, please give a healthy amount of "common patterns of X gotta be done like Y now", and a decent changelog. Don't make version upgrades even more painful than they already are, or at least try to provide shims.

Employability anxiety triggered by technology deprecation (real or perceived) is universal. Think e.g., of the large pool of C++ programmers that feel the stress of "memory safety" and Rust. But framework fatigue seems to be an issue affecting the javascript ecosystem disproportionally hard.

Shiny object syndrome still goes strong in the software engineer population.

Jokes aside, the real value is in the fundamentals. Frameworks (or even simple languages like Go) can be learned to use efficiently in a matter of days. Good fundamentals make this process smoother.

The author names "employability" as one of the reasons developers oppose new tools. Not the take I expect when I started the read, but after giving it a though, it's actually something I've been bothered by recently. Due to favorable circumstances, I didn't have to learn frameworks other than Angular. This obviously limits my career opportunities and I'd be totally OK picking up another tool. But will potential employers even consider my CV that doesn't mention React? Will they be willing to offer the same position level and give me time to learn their stack? I am not so sure about that.

Software Engineering is about always maintaining the right balance between NIH syndrome and dependency hell (yeah, don't pull in leftpad as a dependency).

As such, new frameworks keep coming out as people decide to build something small and focused, and that keeps growing and becomes a framework.

It is bound to continue, as it should.

One should neither get too excited nor too upset, but some of those announcements will sound funny to anyone who's been around for a while (in general it is mostly rehashing all the same ideas from 70s onward).

I can't believe I'm reading this in 2025. People are repeating things which used to be true back in 2014 but don't make any sense in today's context. Even this supposedly 'shiny new' framework called Svelte is from 2016... That was almost 8 years ago.

These days, I would actually complain about the opposite problem that there are not enough new frameworks, given that most current popular frameworks are pretty bad and are literally outdated by 8+ years.

Unfortunately, the tech industry is quite crony now so only frameworks that are built by ex-Google or ex-Facebook engineers have any chance of mainstream adoption... All the others have been gas-lit out of existence... Also, these ex-FAANG engineers who actually have a shot at getting any serious eyeballs are too busy living their best life to be toiling away coding open source frameworks. Many of them never cared much for coding anyway.

Our socioeconomic system is such that the people who hoard ALL the opportunities couldn't be bothered to seize a fraction of them... And those who have all the motivation in the world to build something meaningful have literally zero opportunities to do so.