Wow. It sounds like you are working for the same company I worked - for a very brief time. Is this a JavaScript shop by any chance? ;)
Regardless, you've been there four months; that's long enough to have made it work. It's toxic and abusive and you have to remove yourself from the situation ASAP. If you can afford to quit before finding another job, do so.
I do appreciate all the advice of how to make this work, and it's good advice in general, but bad advice for this situation. While the abuse may ease up after a while, the pecking order will remain the same and they will still be assholes. It's hard to learn through a bruised ego or a broken spirit.
On a side note, I have been the dumbest person in a company. I compensated by being the hardest working. The "smart ones" loved that I did the work while they did smart things.
I think he gets it. He's responding to companies blindly mandating jQuery as its development language whether it's the right solution or not, due to its popularity.
I will however fault him for taking the job in the first place. I apply to JavaScript jobs, not jQuery jobs.
I would recommend using The Dojo or The DojoApp. The DojoApp is probably better as The Dojo is still not only competing with the toolkit but also with hundreds of karate sites.
I'd like to hear some opinions on this myself. I personally don't think it matters anymore, but every time I get an idea for a product/domain, I get told "No. It should have a dot-com." Hm, really? Should it? I like how Delicious went from De.licio.us to delicious.com when they had the money. Most devs can't afford simple domain names.
It depends on what you mean by "real developer". If you are a PHP guy who just needs some plugins on his page, you're good not knowing what's in the black box. If you plan to put JavaScript on your resume, not knowing how jQuery works under the hood is not going to cut it.
Look at it in reverse. I decide not to learn C#, even though I have an idea of how they work. Do I need to know how to query a database? No, I can leave that to someone else and concentrate on JavaScript and call those ASPX APIs. But I don't plan to put C# on my resume.
I agree. HTML5 is a buzzword that gets companies excited about technology, and when that happens, I get paid.
But otherwise, what is going on here is that Mozilla is part of WHATWG, who is largely responsible for the success of HTML5. WC3 actually wanted to drop support for HTML (calling it done) and only within the last year decided to jump in the bandwagon and take credit. And then along the way, get things wrong - like this list of the Mozilla page.
I've always said, "to clients, it's ALL HTML5, but to developers, we should know the difference". But the WC3 is clouding that difference.
It's funny to me that we think nothing of stopping at the gas station and buying a diet coke for two bucks... But when we need to decide between healthy food and crap food all of the sudden that two dollars means so much. Oh How well we have been conditioned by advertising.
Regardless, you've been there four months; that's long enough to have made it work. It's toxic and abusive and you have to remove yourself from the situation ASAP. If you can afford to quit before finding another job, do so.
I do appreciate all the advice of how to make this work, and it's good advice in general, but bad advice for this situation. While the abuse may ease up after a while, the pecking order will remain the same and they will still be assholes. It's hard to learn through a bruised ego or a broken spirit.
On a side note, I have been the dumbest person in a company. I compensated by being the hardest working. The "smart ones" loved that I did the work while they did smart things.