As the restructuring of major Internet companies (layoffs) was announced at the end of the year, attention was focused on the winter of capital and how programmers survived the mid-life crisis. Nuggets, Zhihu can also see similar discussion articles. As a nearly mature programmer, naturally I also have anxiety and thinking.

Transformational management or technical research? Or even a civil servant ashore? I believe the answer will vary from person to person. Recently, I had the honor to be an interviewer. After interviewing a few front-end interviewers, I also had some insights of my own. Although he did not find the answer to the midlife crisis, he seems to have found the reason why he fell into the crisis: he gave up thinking.

Most of the interviewees are around 30 years old, with more than 3 years of work experience and a lot of project experience, from the era of jQuery to the era of MVVM today. However, they fall back on the fundamentals of the framework, advanced usage, and JS, some of which are impressive.

  • React and react-router are used in projects that don’t understand the difference between front-end and back-end routes and confuse render and DidMount sequences
  • There are questions about whether the front end should understand Restful specifications
  • There is uncertainty about the array. map return value
  • Someone who has plans to be a front-end architect in the future but doesn’t know Node yet
  • Some Promise thought it was fetch

In terms of closures, scopes, Redux/Vuex, event-loop and other basic questions, no one can answer even the most superficial concepts. So much so that I was regarded as a “dead end”.

When asked about some of the above questions, the response is usually “I use them but don’t pay much attention to them”. Investigate its reason, is this did not pay attention to, and did not pay attention to the back is no reflection.

“Why is this project using Redux/Vuex?” “, “Why do DOM operations in DidMounted/Created? “, “Why did Promise replace Callback? And so on. If we have more question marks when doing projects, I believe that we will not be completely clueless when facing these interview questions.

It’s funny how when we play Dota, LOL, or Pesticide, we often replay and summarize after a game, whether we win or lose, looking at our stats and thinking about our highlights and mistakes. By doing this again and again, you grow from diamond to star, and from star to king without even knowing it. Coding is the same thing, isn’t it?

I once saw a signature to the effect that:

With the level of effort, it’s not even a talent

I think the “effort” here may mean in the work life of their own thinking. This experience is also a good mirror, reminding me of the importance of thinking. While the answer to how programmers get through their midlife crises is still unknown, at least if they can ask themselves a few more why questions, they can get ahead of those who don’t.