I'd recommend trying again; none of the article's message is specific to or contingent on Next, and it'd be a shame to dismiss it over something so superficial.
Eh, I disagree. It's a tech article and the writer clearly isn't familiar enough with the topic to catch this issue. It shows they are not actually really close to the tech or if they are, they don't proofread their articles.
The frontend tooling debacle has got to the point where I'm not only leaving frontend development, but tech entirely. To not have to think about this endless nonsense anymore is such a massive weight off my shoulders.
And both of these tools are basically drop in replacements for each other with very little configuration. This blog post is saying the performance difference is negligible.
So I guess it’s bad that instead of radically different configs and performance of Webpack vs Rollup vs Parcel vs etc, compared to the future of choosing between a much more mature build tool market with Vite and Turbopack is a bad thing?
Amazing, you helped the person in question with a single sentence. I can feel their stress disappearing.
Mere fact that we're at the point where we have transpiler upon transpiler upon transpiler, where "wRiTtEn iN rUsT" is used as quality/performance control, where people throw term performance around as if it's a hot potato and no one mentions environments/hardware and actual real world use scenarios and where apparently everyone are building World of Warcraft scale apps in frontend is what's making a mockery out of entire frontend world. It's no wonder that entry is difficult and that so many impostors are trying to build a name for themselves by producing yet another useless library that's gazillion times faster than the other useless library.
Frontend is a joke because of self-proclaimed developers building tools which they themselves can't use or explain to wide audience and that causes negative feeling when one has to deal with frontend manure.
Do you remember when we were stuck on Grunt? Options are good.
I wish you well in your new career as a professional sculptor but "the js ecosystem has too many options!" gets posted on every one of these threads with little specific relevance to the article at hand.
Are there companies that expect their developers to keep up with the latest developments so aggressively? At my job, things like Remix/Deno/Turbopack make the water-cooler conversations, but we only use established tools for projects. I think it would take several years for me to fall behind if I simply ignored new frameworks and tools.
I thought this too, working at a company mostly focused on jQuery/Rails as a foundation for a lot of the work I was doing.
I've been searching for a "full-stack" Web development job for the past 8 months this year, and aside from industry incompatibilities, the biggest headwind I'm facing finding an employer that recognizes front-end development is so much bigger than how you arrange your JavaScript to enable interactivity.
I have experience with React; my last career position allowed me to go from 0-100% confidence/competence with Svelte in 4 months. But employers want to see some equivalent of "3-5 years experience with React" and structure their shitty technical assessments similarly, and I've really had a problem trying to find the right way to show I'm just as qualified.
Build tools: when I interview candidates I ask them to explain what things like Webpack do. I don't care if they can write a config for it (but it's nice).
Runtimes: a lot of frontend JS engineers don't know what these are. Being able to explain them (and the difference between Node and Deno for ex) is a good answer. For backend jobs this is a hard requirement, but when I see "Node" in a frontend job listing I assume it means "can install packages from Node."
Frameworks: (like Next) it depends. If I'm hiring for an app already built in one, maybe. A general answer like "SSR is a problem with React" and "this framework solves that problem this way" is useful.
There is no risk if you're genuinely running a small business.
If you're a permalancer, coining a freelance rate whilst paying very little tax (no PAYE), then you _should_ be caught out. You _should_ have the liability.
The problem is that the rules are ambiguous and in some industries (such as software development) it is not possible to effectively separate employees from contractors which means that even legitimate contracting activity can look like disguised employment.
If you operate a business that provides software development services and want to help a client with their existing software project (who already has full-time employees working on it) you will often need to become embedded within their team which includes participating in regular meetings (including daily standups) and do "employee-ish" things that look risky from an IR35 point of view. Just speccing out a clear scope of work in advance is very difficult as sometimes the scope will vary over time as edge-cases are discovered during development, so the SOW will end up very broad and may look employee-ish. Your best bet is to have mitigating factors such as working for multiple clients, using your own equipment, etc and possibly contract length (I am not sure if it counts, IMO it definitely should) but none of those are bulletproof either.
Contributing to an existing codebase in parallel with a client's in-house development team is risky from an IR35 point of view even if you are doing so in good faith and want to operate a business rather than just be a "permalancer". That's also why with the new rules (that are now being repealed), a lot of companies did a blanket determination of putting everyone "Inside" IR35 because the rules are not only unclear to begin with, but even more difficult to correctly interpret and apply in certain industries.
The spirit of the rules seems fairly clear even for software development. If you're being brought in to help with some specific project or to achieve some specific goal, you are doing that work autonomously and according to your own professional judgement, and you're otherwise operating as an independent business, you're not supposed to be caught by IR35. Obviously there will be some need for communication with other people who work for your client if the project or goal is part of the client's wider activities but that doesn't mean you're an employee.
Personally I'd get very nervous about the kind of contracting where you're expected to integrate with a client's Agile processes that have things like daily meetings and breaking tasks down to very small chunks where sometimes you get them and sometimes a permanent employee does and sometimes they move between you. That starts to look too much like a grey area even if everything else is set up like an independent business.
Maybe there should be some alternative status to support flexible temporary employees that reflects their closer involvement with a client/employer while they're working there but also makes allowances for the added risks and limited employee protections and the extra downtime they will probably have between gigs. It's obviously useful to have this kind of flexible labour force but it doesn't really make much sense to treat it the same as either running a truly independent business like a freelancer or being a full employee with the security and benefits that brings.
Edit: I'm thinking of a model where the rates and allowances work out the same as full-time permanent employment if you do end up working consistently but maybe the important figures get calculated over a whole tax year or can even be carried over across years to compensate for the unpredictability. Then you can probably let the market decide the rest of the pricing in terms of how much extra that flexibility is worth to clients and how much compensation is needed for the added risk to attract enough flexible workers.
It's funny that if the client decides to hire a big consultancy to do exactly the same thing, these rules do not apply.
The big consultancy gets paid an invoice, they pay their employee some salary and keep the profit.
If one man band business does the same thing, there is all sort of fuss about being a disguised employee and if the IR35 is applied, then they get taxed on the entire invoice.
To bring level playing field, these big consultancies should also be taxed on the invoice paid by the client, without being able to keep profit. If their workers were assessed for IR35, they would all be caught by it.
You're still liable for corporation & dividend tax. Though the rates are favourable towards the independent contractor, there isn't a huge amount of difference between a perm. employee these days; when you factor in the additional risk taken on by the independent contractor, it's difficult to say either way which one has the better deal.
We're not talking about someone who's doing better than you because they worked harder or had a better idea or took a useful risk that paid off. We're just talking about someone who paid less tax than everyone else in the same situation by using a trick that is potentially criminal tax evasion and getting away with it. Calling for any unintended loophole in the tax rules to be closed is hardly "spite" or "desiring punishment".
When IR35 was first introduced there were a significant number of people working through limited companies for the tax advantages who did enjoy much the same benefits as permanent employees. They had long notice periods to end contracts, they got to use staff facilities, etc. They were basically employees in all but name and that's why they were seen as dodging tax and IR35 was introduced.
The problem with IR35 has never been the principle that disguised employees should not escape the normal employee tax rules. It's always been that there were also significant numbers of other people affected who really were working more independently and acting like any other real business, which just happened to be owner-operated in their case. Even if they're doing nothing wrong all of these people now have this IR35-shaped sword hanging over every contract they take and so do their clients.
If nothing else it creates extra admin and more legal and insurance costs for those involved. I've known promising contracts to get sunk at the last minute because one side or the other was concerned about some of the details looking a bit too close to being caught by IR35 and because naturally these tend to be relatively short jobs it's not always worth engaging serious lawyers to resolve things. Basically it means everyone loses and all because the tax rules were ambiguous and created more risk than the contract was worth to either or both parties.
My experience contracting very many years ago (and before IR35) was that you were ultimately just a hired hand, compared to permanent employees, even if you were expected to turn up every day just like an employee, and your contract (which was usually only 3, 6 months) etc, would roll over and over as though you were permanent.
Sick days, no pay. Holidays, no pay. Economic downturn? You will be the first out the door. Contract not renewed? Tough, don't expect any 'severence'. Company makes a huge profit? No bonus for you. Forget billing for company parties/outings, etc. Training? lololol, up to you. Plus, you pay your own pension, social security taxes, etc.
I think it can only help. Employability aside, you might even enjoy doing them! The AWS certs aren't to be sniffed at, even if your experience after completing it is only theoretical (better than nothing).
It is actually a fundamental insight. The same principle explains why the cortex has developed functional areas, and the advantages of mylenation.
It also underlies Dunbar's rule on group sizes and how organizations scale.
The point is exactly as you say, everyone does NOT need to speak to everyone else-- but you then have to structure the communication channels. This is a different challenge in a 15 person org than a 3 person org. Let alone a 150 person org.
If you've ever been on a team which went from 5 to 8 people, you've seen this play out. God help you if the team crosses 15 people and you don't realize this triggers a phase shift.
