The pattern enterprise leaders keep seeing
You hire a mid-level React developer. Strong portfolio. Clean component architecture. Ships features fast.
Then production breaks. A CORS error. An API bottleneck making 47 calls per page load. A query taking eight seconds. They stare at the screen, waiting for someone else to fix it.
This isn't about React. It's about what happens when developers learn frameworks before fundamentals. The bootcamp-to-job pipeline optimizes for speed, not depth. React dominates job postings, so bootcamps teach React. Juniors build SPAs with client-side routing and global state management, but can't explain what happens between typing a URL and seeing a page.
The skills gap shows up in debugging. Framework developers check components for unnecessary re-renders. Web developers open the Network tab first. The second person ships faster in production.
Why this matters for hiring
Sixty-five percent of development jobs sit in small businesses requiring full-stack skills. Database optimization, client-server architecture, HTTP mechanics. React-only knowledge covers maybe 35% of what most teams actually need.
The fundamentals that bootcamps skip (HTTP methods, headers, status codes, SQL query plans, how sockets work) don't expire. React will be replaced. HTTP won't. Teams building on shaky foundations create technical debt that senior engineers spend years unwinding.
What enterprise teams can do
Test for web fundamentals during interviews. Ask candidates to diagnose a slow app. If they start with React components instead of the Network tab, keep looking.
For existing teams, create time for foundation-building. Pair framework work with web mechanics. Thirty minutes learning what browsers actually send per hour of useEffect debugging.
The AI era makes this more urgent, not less. AI handles framework code. It doesn't replace understanding request-response cycles, stateless web architecture, or why a 304 status code matters. Those skills separate developers who ship from developers who debug.
Frameworks accelerate development by auto-managing state representation. That's valuable. But acceleration on a weak foundation just means hitting the wall faster.