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Be an Engineer, not a Frameworker
Time to level up.
This article is a plea for self-improvement. You can do this. Be an engineer.
As always, caveats first: Engineers definitely should and do use frameworks. They’re beautiful bits of engineering that get stuff done in a maintainable way. Frameworks are not the enemy of this article. Bravo, frameworks. OK, enough of that.
Sorry, what are frameworks? Frameworks are software tools that provide a scaffolding to complete software projects of a particular type. So if you want to write a single-page web app in TypeScript, you don’t have to do it from scratch because there’s Angular. Want to do some Machine Learning in Python? Allow me to introduce my friends Scikit-Learn and Keras. Want to write a backend in C#? (Oh my, you’re very hip.) I’m sure you already know about ASP.NET. I could do this for the next 1500 words, but you get the idea.
If you know a framework, you can often get a job that has the word “engineer” in the title, and possibly “machine learning”. If you know two frameworks, you might get a job that also has the words “full stack” in the title. But your skill set needs to go much deeper than frameworks if you’re going to have success in your next job — the one where you get hired because you had 3–5 years of “engineering” experience on your resume. Otherwise, you’re going to be sitting in a very uncomfortable chair at that 90-day review.
You may need to go on a journey. From Frameworker to Programmer to Engineer. Let’s look at each of these phases of the journey. I’ll describe each one and talk about what professional progress looks like for that phase.
The Frameworker
Just because you primarily work in a framework (or two) doesn’t mean you’re a Frameworker. But you might be.
Frameworks allow a Frameworker to build software products in a way similar to how IKEA allows me to build shelving units. When the work is done, did I make a shelving unit? Yes. Should I be describing myself as a Shelf Engineer? Probably not.
What is a Frameworker lacking?
