I see these kinds of comments all the time here on HN “X developer colleague of mine was really clueless about Y technology they were using” and they are so unfathomable to me. I’ve worked with bad colleagues & people who made foolish comments but usually the worst colleagues I’ve had err on the side of immensely increasing complexity. And generally everyone I’ve worked with had a basic understanding of the tech we were using or was a junior with some curiosity.
Who are these completely clueless developers? How do they get hired?
Some of them were indeed clueless. But also a bunch of them were great developers. I remember one who came from Flash and easily adopted the react.js SPA mindset without really understanding HTML/dom. For him almost never was it a practical problem, but it was interesting to see sometimes and he would have a completely different approach to the web. He for instance didn't understand at first why I wanted URL's to stay the same and meta title's to be correctly set. I don't have a principle problem with it. It's just an interesting development.
Who are these completely clueless developers? How do they get hired?