Ask HN: Why are there never any job postings for non web positions?

Web development is hot right now. Really really hot. In Atlanta, code school grads with little experience are getting snapped up as soon as they graduate. I'm having to look to Eastern European remote talent because salary expectations in the US are unreal.

Literally every company needs a web presence, and it's quickly getting to the point where the usual crappy UX just isn't cutting it.

It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering. You have to stay on top of trends, keep building your skills. You don't deal with algorithms much, but your OOP needs to be on point if you hope to build something maintainable for the web.

Most of the potential talent has a subtle disdain for web work, everyone wants to be a game dev or do stuff that's math-heavy or algorithmic.

So giant shortage of good web programmers.

drtse42• 12 years ago

It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering. You have to stay on top of trends, keep building your skills.

Wait, what?? :)

Tossrock• 12 years ago

"It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering."

I would disagree with this point, as evidenced by the fact that people coming out of code schools are still getting hired. To do software engineering in other fields (financial, embedded systems, game dev, operating systems, enterprise LOB, cloud platform, crypto, big data/distributed systems, etc) takes a lot more experience and training. A competent programmer can crank out a rails based Mom & Pop small business site in less than a day. You can't really crank out Big Table, or Unreal Engine. However, the market size for small business web sites vastly exceeds that for Big Table.

vinceguidry14• 12 years ago

It's a steep cliff. Everyone says the barrier to entry is low, and it is, but there's a ginormous difference between Mom & Pop site and something suitable for even a small business. E-commerce is sorta simple, but the constant need for third-party integrations will bury you if you don't work hard to keep everything simple. And the demand for those integrations just keeps coming.

There's also a much larger number of technologies you have to work with. With financial, embedded, game dev, OS, crypto, big data, you have a finite number of languages / tools to learn, once you learn them, you spend the rest of your career perfecting them. With web dev, you have to not only perfect your tools, but constantly integrate new tools and languages and paradigms into your workflow. It's a lot harder than it looks to do well.

And just because code school grads are getting hired doesn't mean they're making useful contributions from day one. Guaranteed it'll be some time before they're really worth their salary.

atmosx• 12 years ago

A competent programmer can crank out a rails based Mom & Pop small business site in less than a day.

I never wrote any code in C, but given a tutorial I'm pretty sure I could create a client-server application to exchange time in milliseconds between two hosts. Would you use it instead of your NTPd daemon in a production server? Of course you wouldn't.

Likewise, I'm very sceptical when I read about programmers who learned Javascript in a weekend or wrote a rails application in one week without knowing Ruby. Is it possible yes? Do I trust the app or the programmer absolutely not.

Web development is not considered programming by friends of mine that indulge themselves in (linux) kernel development, write (or try to write) code for drivers, do reverse engineering and what not.

But to create a modern website these days you need to know lots of things: CSS3, HTML5, Rails, Ruby, Javascript (Angnular? Ember?), you also need to know how to combine them. How to setup everything in order to mitigate attacks, etc.

Ruby and Rails are easy to learn but hard to master, same goes for JS (with all the whistles and bells that the language comes and the various frameworks try to elude one way or another). There's also Go, Python, PHP... Same goes for all these languages: Easy to learn hard to master.

So, any language can be hard or easy depending on a wide variety of things, but web-dev is not easy these days. It's easy to be mediocre, it's not easy to be good.

alexbecker• 12 years ago

Most of the potential talent has a subtle disdain for web work, everyone wants to be a game dev or do stuff that's math-heavy or algorithmic.

Many of us have a not-so-subtle disdain for it, too. (I'm not saying I don't respect web devs--quite the contrary--but I hate writing JS/PHP)

jghn5• 12 years ago

Agreed. While I completely disagree w/ the statement that webdev is de facto more difficult than other softeng fields, there are difficult challenges that they face.

However, I wouldn't touch webdev with a 10 foot pole, at least not the front end stuff. While not intellectually complicated, there's something about that stuff which makes my eyes cross, my head hurt and my brain melt.

walshemj2• 12 years ago

Well technical programming has always looked down on "commercial" programming even more so if you work at the high end.

I recall a female friend of mine who sighed and obviously though I had sold out when I switched from pure technical (on campus at CIT) to more commercial job working for a big civils constancy

gamechangr3• 12 years ago

I would be interested in learning about the demand in Atlanta? Which language? How much is a reasonable expectation?

I did a Ruby on Rails bootcamp in Chicago awhile back. At the end, I decided to take a mid six figure job in another industry and am wanting to go back.

It's been two years and while I have been able to save a couple years reserve now, I am basically starting over. I lean towards Ruby on Rails, because at one time I was offered an entry position as well as I know maybe a dozen developers that went through the same program.

I have money/time and the determination (In a previous job I taught myself chemical engineering, so Ruby on Rails was much easier)

ANY ADVICE WOULD BE APPRECIATED!

vinceguidry14• 12 years ago

Reasonably, you can probably expect $80K-$95K, over six figures if you shop around. Or I could make you an offer for maybe $60K. (send me an email, it's in my profile) I can put you in touch with a great recruiting firm. But since you have the time to look around, you should start coming to the meetups, there's usually a good turnout. Everyone I meet there is working at a company that's looking for at least one dev.

totalrobe5• 12 years ago

Mid six figure as in between 100k and 999k so around 550k?

You definitely won't find that kind of salary as a rails dev.

syntern• 12 years ago

I'm having to look to Eastern European remote talent

My experience is that as soon as I mention that I'd soon move back to my home country (in Eastern Europe), the conversation dries up, as 99.9% of the SV companies that contacted me are only looking to move talent to SV, and don't want to have remove positions.

lightblade2• 12 years ago

Another reason that's contributing to the shortage is that universities are not emphasizing on it. The university that I went to doesn't even have web development course. There was one experimental summer course, then it never happened again. Even the Android development class went on to become very popular.

So what's left is that those that work in web development are either self trained or goes through one of those dev bootcamps. But people that goes into these programs does not necessarily have a CS background, and to be a "good web programmer", you do need that kind of background.

sanderjd5• 12 years ago

Note that universities haven't traditionally seen it as their role in society to teach job skills, believing that breadth of knowledge and subject area fundamentals are more difficult, more important, and more widely applicable, and that companies can and should foot the bill to train their employees on the details of their jobs. You can certainly argue that this is an outdated view, but it isn't a new thing.

drinchev• 12 years ago

I'm ... freelancing eastern european web developer (LOL that's long) based in Berlin :D

Write me, if you're in really deep trouble. ;)

ant6n• 12 years ago

I'd say Eastern Europe ends 120Km East of you (Frankurt/Oder).

thomasloh4• 12 years ago

but your OOP needs to be on point if you hope to build something maintainable for the web.

OOP != maintainable codebase

vinceguidry14• 12 years ago

OOP done right does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design)

walshemj2• 12 years ago

amen - even small 3k products websites are about far more than OOP just knowing how all your pages are generated is a big ask fore most sites.

Iftheshoefits• 12 years ago

Web development's difficulty is a shallow complexity that doesn't require (deep) problem solving ability so much as it requires a willingness to tolerate tedium.

The kicker is that, in my opinion, almost all of the complexity in webdev is superficial and to a high degree artificially (by choosing an inappropriate application data transport protocol,HTTP) introduced precisely because of the perception that developer talent in the field is cheap (cheaper than alternatives at least).

Edit: and from your other comment suggesting you can get a $60k offer to somebody implies there is not a real shortage of talent (good or otherwise) and that you consider webdev to be a commodity, and not actually "hard".

vinceguidry14• 12 years ago

I do not find web dev tedious. Not at all. Not even a little bit.

I solve problems once. Once solved, if I need the solution again, I refactor or extract the needed solution to a library and reuse it. If I find myself writing the same kind of code enough times to where if I continued it'd become tedious, I switch gears and start looking for an abstraction.

Web applications 'grow'. Their growth needs to be managed. If you don't manage it well, your business needs suffer horribly.

and from your other comment suggesting you can get a $60k offer to somebody implies there is not a real shortage of talent (good or otherwise) and that you consider webdev to be a commodity, and not actually "hard".

No it means that we've tried the corporate approach and found it a non-starter, so I have lots of leeway to drive the hiring process. There just aren't any good candidates willing to work for the money we're willing to pay. I have to lead up front with our salary because we've done it too many times where once salary comes up the whole process breaks down.

ritchiea• 12 years ago

What areas of software development require deep problem solving?

jghn5• 12 years ago

To be fair to vinceguidry I think a few things are at play here:

- web development is a monstrous sub-field in the software engineering field. As others have pointed out, just about everything has some sort of web presence somewhere. There's a pretty big difference between someone doing something groundbreaking and novel and someone making the 920375235236th standard CRUD oriented java enterprise site. The latter camp will grossly outnumber the former camp by multiple orders of magnitude, but I think it's clear that what vinceguidry is referring to is the former (at least I hope he is)

- People tend to think that their sub-field in the software world is some sort of special snowflake that makes it harder to deal with than the others. They're aware of the tricky bits of their sub-field due to having a ton of specialized knowledge, but then look at the other ones and mainly see the surface scratching bits and declare, "Oh, that's easy!".

- Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and will tend to gravitate towards the areas that they'll excel at. People also like to think that they're smart and that their coworkers are smart, so assumptions can be made that all of the smart people are gravitating where they're heading. To loop back to the OP a bit here, HN has a strong bias towards bay area startup culture which has a strong bias towards web development (generally of the former category I described above, at least they all would self-report themselves in that category) so everything is going to be seen through that bias.

In my circle of software friends we span a pretty broad range of the industry. Over time the view we've taken when discussing each other's world is that we all could rapidly learn to do the jobs that the others do, however most of us wouldn't want to. Personally my point of pain is when I start hearing about UI oriented stuff, but when I start talking about reworking algorithms to scale from GB to PB that's when they start tuning out. Neither's harder, they're just different.

gwbas1c• 12 years ago

"because salary expectations in the US are unreal"

I once got a lowball (cough) offer that was so bad, I wouldn't have been able to pay my (unusually low) rent, buy gas for my (paid off) high-milage car, and make my (unusually low) monthly student loan. Health care was not included.

My experience is that employers with that attitude aren't worth working for. These employers don't respect my career, nor do they have a realistic understanding of how to make a profit.

onan_barbarian• 12 years ago

It also happens to be as hard or harder than most other types of software engineering.

This remarkable statement is probably true if we correct difficulty levels to the average ability of the population of "web developers".

Doing stuff that's "math-heavy or algorithmic" often involves years of training before you are even remotely effective. People are not snapping up the equivalent of "code school grads with little experience" to design and build optimizing compilers, computer vision systems, high performance distributed systems, operating systems, etc.

vinceguidry14• 12 years ago

Double standard much?

You need years of training before you're any good at web dev too. For the fields you listed, people build toy solutions to all of those problems all the time. Just for fun.

So much unreasonable elitism in this industry.

drtse42• 12 years ago

If you are referring to the monthly jobs threads i was wondering the same thing, i would have expected more people searching for mobile developer (especially freelancers), but i guess mobile apps are not yet the new "website".

rday• 12 years ago

Over the past 6 months I've had multiple clients drop their mobile requirement to focus on web. I think it has mainly to do with scope creep and cost.

All those extra features that you can cram on a web page need that much more effort on mobile. People, for some reason, seem to be understanding that mobile costs a LOT of money, so they wait until later. But they expect to be able to build the web side really cheap, so they stick with that and argue price.

Just my little anecdote....

mwfunk• 12 years ago

I always assumed it was because HN is somewhat specific to YC and SV startups, and pretty much everything that YC and other VCs are investing in right now is mobile and/or web stuff.

There are plenty of other tech jobs, just not necessarily in the startups that YC focuses on.

polvi• 12 years ago

All YC companies build technology, however many (most?) are building technology for markets that traditionally have not used technology in a modern way. These are things like cleaning (HomeJoy), flower delivery (Bloomthat), t-shirts (Teespring), etc etc. Theses technology enabled businesses are the ones that primarily use web/mobile, and thus all the jobs.

logfromblammo• 12 years ago

Journalists and novelists are both writers, but they do not compete in the same niche.

The former will need to do several hundred writing jobs per year, while the latter may only need two. Thus, 99.5% of writing jobs may be for journalist stories. Any novelist looking for commissioned work will not want to sift through 200 posts to find even one relevant listing. So people posting such jobs would probably get better results on a site that explicitly excludes the noise.

In short, there are more "lightweight" postings because the people who solicit them and do them need to secure new work more often. If you can make 20 websites in the same time that you could build one enterprise application, you will probably see that job advertisements are 95% for websites and 5% for business software.

yellowapple• 12 years ago

Because this site has been overrun by (and/or revolves around) Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who don't give a damn about something unless it's in the form of a single-page noSQL web-scale big-data in-the-cloud CrappucinoScript imperatively dysfunctional HTTP2 Wangular.js monstrosity written by "hipster rockstar ninja devs" wielding Macbooks and plaid shirts and pocket calculators and half the inventory of ThinkGeek in a mockery of actual programming? ;)

More seriously, it's because web developers are in high demand, so there are going to be more postings for them; having a proper web presence is absolutely vital to modern businesses nowadays, and that requires developers to establish that presence. Hacker News is also run by YCombinator, which specializes in funding startups - a market which tends to lean very heavily on web development, since many of those startups are based on web apps - and therefore will already have an inflated quantity of web development jobs by that virtue alone.

jtbigwoo• 12 years ago

It's partly selection bias. The content here probably doesn't have as much appeal for the middle managers who do a lot of the hiring at big companies.

gizzlon• 12 years ago

As others have said, web development is hot right now. In my experience, it's hard to find people willing to build customized back-end stuff. It's probably too expensive, and companies just buy whatever ready-made solutions that kind-of cover their needs. (think ERP, CRM's etc)

The demand for web-devs might be artificially high right now, as most normal people have not yet discovered that they do not really need a programmer to build their website. I think Squarespace / Wix / WP etc, maybe with a custom design, should cover most websites.

I've been doing back-end web programming as a freelancer for a few months, but it's really hard to find good clients, so I'm moving to something else.

mathattack• 12 years ago

The warning sign of 1999 was Marketing majors becoming web developers. Are we there again?

Ask HN: Why are there never any job postings for non web positions?

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