> Another practical reason not to use htmx is that there are, rounding off, zero htmx jobs.
> I just did a search for htmx jobs on indeed and found a grand total of two: one at Microsoft and one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
> A search for “react”, on the other hand, gives 13,758 jobs.
> Seriously, developer, which of these two technologies do you want to hitch your career to?
I do not advocated for htmx; but this take is so bad!
Resume-driven development should not be a thing. If you are a professional developer, building a product for a user, your primary concern should not be the job market for when you quit the company you are working for, but rather making the best product possible for the user within the context of the current company. And if the product is such that it does not call for react, or some other javascript-rich client, then you shouldn't use it however many react jobs there may be on Indeed.
(In all seriousness, this entire article is facetious and is highlighting the strengths of HTMX. They are not sincerely advocating for 'resume driven development'.)
And the frameworks are churned continuously and are also bug-ridden nightmares, so that continuous development and support is needed to keep websites functioning and secure.
Any reduction in framework complexity threatens the whole edifice.
- How easy is it to hire people with experience in this?
- Relatedly, how easy will it be for the org to maintain this software after I (or the original team) leaves?
When NoRedInk switched to Elm, Richard Feldman, who was asked about whether this impacted their hiring experience in any negative way, said that on the contrary, hiring had never been better, because although the pool of candidates grew smaller, their quality (either prior experience of working with type-safe functional programming languages, or enthusiasm for learning them) got higher.
When Alex Russell announced several openings at Microsoft for development of design systems with web components, and certainly no react, he said this attracted a lot of really strong candidates.
I am not saying that a good web developer should be able to pick up any exotic language, such as elm, or purescript, or rescript, or clojurescript at no time; but what I am saying is that as far as web frameworks are concerned, they shouldn't be a criterion for hiring, and are unlikely to become an obstacle to it.
Pretend this is not about library choice, but rather about language choice. One language has 2 jobs, and the other language 13k jobs. I doubt you'd think for more than a second.
The Hacker News website runs on Lisp. How many jobs do you see on the market that ask for Lisp? And yet, for what it is, this site is amazing! I don't see them rushing to migrate to a python backend and a react-based frontend, no matter how many jobs there are for those.
The other language - HTML - has over 30,000 jobs
Survival is more important.
On the other hand htmx is nice to have, if it solves your problem. Still you should use what benefits you in the context of a customer.
If you ask me, I think the web is for viewing static content, download content, or share links that your browser should delegate to an app.
Reality is often disappointing. I'd love to be working deep in my Vulkan rendering knowledge, but it's clear right now with my lack of job that I need to grind leetcode instead and work on personal projects first. Graphics programming is already such a stiff bar to get into and it's only gotten stiffer as I go along.
I'm going a little bit on a limb by also cultivating Rust, so I'm not optimizing my RDD. But I still looked for a compromise of what I like and what's in demand.
