Who has time to learn all the JavaScript frameworks anyway?

You're right @rtpHarry - it's hard not to come off sounding negative about the incredible innovation happening in this space. But as you point out, you have to decide the best course of action on a particular day, and usually you're stuck with it and that's a tough thing is such a fast moving dicipline.

At Quill we just try to hire for skills. We are in the process of hiring a new senior front end engineer and don't ask for any specific frameworks - just experience of building non trivial javascript apps. Most people who have that experience have come across one or more of the major ones and thats fine. As a candidate looking for jobs then yes, things can be a lot tougher. Many employers insist on $YEARS of $FRAMEWORK and can't really see beyond that. It's particularly acute for contractors. OTOH, it's a pretty good sign that they don't have a good engineering culture, so you are probably being done a favour.

@andrewmrobbins I completely agree that the plethora of options is incredibly inspiring - it shows just how much creativity is bustling around our area of expertise. Intelligence and ambition aside though, not everybody is lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to nail a job with a forward thinking company or knows enough to be able to consult from gig to gig. Many front end devs are just guys and gals that need to put food on the table and get through the next round of redundancies in their enterprise work place. And to be fair, it's not the creators that should slow down or stop what they're doing - I'm not saying that at all because as you say, tremendous progress is being made. But is that progress focussed in a single direction to better the industry as a whole, or is that progress being made by different teams being spread too thin? I feel like the ES6 movement is an example of the first kind of progress, and I feel like a lot of teams and people are getting behind it as a standard and as a practice - which makes me very happy! I'm lucky enough to be in the first category and even then, given the amount of freedom I have, I'm hard pressed to stay up to date with how many things are changing, let alone have enough time to properly evaluate them enough to give a professional opinion on whether or not they should be used in the next project. And I'm one of the lucky ones :)

That's a great point @davidb583 - being able to reuse existing knowledge within your company or even between consulting jobs is incredibly important. In fact, it's probably why there is such a big push for "back to basics" plain old JavaScript - why? Because everybody in this game knows it! And doesn't have to learn something new. But if you have the Backbone or jQuery knowledge, you really would like some way to reuse that from all your developers! It's one of the reasons I'm quite excited about Aurelia coming out because they way they've done it, you can use their routing, but hook in your backbone views, or your knockout binding or ReactJs for fast rendering - it's all pluggable, and therefore gives you an opportunity to keep those skills you learned over the last few years and reused them without the framework forcing you to its will.

I couldn't agree with you more @cayoub88 - very valid points. JQuery was (and is) excellent, even if it is overused, because it really opened our eyes to the possibilities of the web at a time where many vanilla JS devs were stagnating. It feels like jQuery is the originator of much of the innovation we've had over the last 10 years, to the point where many of the things expounded are now baked into the core language. I agree that ES6 is the logical extension for any JS developer going forward, and has a learning curve of sorts, but not nearly as much when you consider that many JS devs have background in languages that already have these features, so it's more of a merging of knowledge than learning from scratch. The same cannot be said for most JS frameworks unfortunately, and Angular is particularly bad at forcing a steep learning curve with very little benefit of potential knowledge reuse unless you stay on Angular, but even that is now up for question with v2. For me - I prefer vanilla JS, but if I must (and often I really really must) use a framework, I'd prefer that it stays out of my way while I go ahead and write JavaScript.