Web Development as a career – the realities

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rU5-t09tEBym1wD3NUr7s9mMgFBmfGJNBz3F8TGzDsU/edit?usp=sharing

by johnnymu • 11 years ago

97 79 11 years ago

docs.google.com

karthi18• 11 years ago

Nice Topic. Actually i'm in the web development field for past three years. The reality of the web development was difficult to understand.

thebenedict• 11 years ago

All good thoughts, but not specific to web dev! Applies to any career path you're serious about.

subrat_rout• 11 years ago

As a recent student in a coding bootcamp I believe your essay is very informative. It will be useful as one of a guiding docs for beginners. Thank you

WalterSear2• 11 years ago

Fwiw, don't take it as cannon, and expect exceptions to every rule.

TheAceOfHearts• 11 years ago

One minor point I disagree with is mobile development. For certain apps it's extremely important... But there's a lot of complicated applications that don't work on mobile at all. So if you wanted to support mobile you'd have to design and build two separate applications. That requires a lot of resources and manpower. Another alternative is to hide most of the functionality that won't work well in mobile, but depending on what problems you solve, this could make your application useless.

As for the overall topic, I think I agree. It seems to me that server-side technologies are better researched and understood. But then you look at client-side technology, it's chaotic. Building and maintaining user interfaces is hard... Recently I've been playing around with flux and react, and I feel like it's definitely a step in the right direction towards building simple components that can be easily maintained and extended.

rifung• 11 years ago

"when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer 'Because I have been coding for 5 years'."

Maybe 5 years is insufficient, to be considered senior, but isn't the amount of time you've been coding what defines how senior you are? I get that technologies come and go and you have to stay up to date, but I would think that if someone were looking for a senior developer they would be looking for someone with a lot of experience, not necessarily someone who knows the ins and outs of technology X.

Can anyone shed some light on this? It just seems bizarre to me that if you want to be a senior developer you'd need to either stick with the same technologies you used before..

xupybd• 11 years ago

Yeah I don't think I'd want to work for this guy. Keeping up is one thing. What makes a mature dev is language/tech agnostic.

robotkilla4• 11 years ago

i have 12 years experience and my interviews have gone to complete train wrecks in the past - i cringe to think the interviewer might have had the same point of view as this guy, that I had just watched some videos and knew things at a high level. What a flat out ignorant view point.

velox_io• 11 years ago

I don't use any of the languages I used in college or uni. Does mean that I wasted loads of time and money?

No, the theory is much more valuable. Plus, it doesn't fall out of fashion the way frameworks do.

jsprogrammer• 11 years ago

To me, the 'Senior' adjective in a job title corresponds to the individual's position within the organization that has bestowed that title, not necessarily to the individual's abilities compared to the larger community.

thirdtruck2• 11 years ago

I agree. Based on the titles I've seen in my recent job searches, they're incredibly inconsistent between companies anyway.

gaius6• 11 years ago

5 years! A career these days is 40-45 years. If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

20 years experience, on a wide range of technologies, in a variety of roles, then we'll talk senior. Until then calling yourself "senior" just invites people not to take you seriously.

UK-AL2• 11 years ago

Where I am, you have to call yourself senior to get a salary comparable to other professions.

michaelchisari2• 11 years ago

If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

Our industry has a significant salary cap, since 27 year olds hold "senior positions", the 47 year olds aren't going to be making much more than them.

aswanson3• 11 years ago

20 years in this industry invites people to treat you as a fossil and not even hire. Technology moves too fast, nobody cares what you did in 1995 anywhere near as much as what you did in 2013.

fennecfoxen2• 11 years ago

If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there?

Depends. After 5 years of being a senior developer, you might begin to think about being a junior architect or tech lead of some sort.

Now, I think I was a pretty senior developer after 5 years, but then I also had preprofessional experience going back another 5 years, and a few years of hobby experience before that... :P

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

Yeah, not the case at all.

Seniority means, to us at least, experience (i.e. beyond "don't know what you don't know" and at the "know I know some stuff but there's a lot I don't know" stage) and the ability to rapidly pick up and grok new tech, languages, ways of working, and what have you.

It's not about a certain level of experience in Node.js, or whether you have used the shiny new tech that came out last Thursday - it's about whether you can.

neverminder• 11 years ago

Web development is like an entry point for programming these days, the lowest hanging fruit if you will. I would not exactly call anyone who does exclusively web development "senior". It's like being a nurse - I suppose you can become a senior nurse, but you're not going to be a doctor. There's only so much you can progress professionally in web development, and each new stack gets easier to pick up, almost no challenge, patterns repeat and boredom sets in. I started from website development, then went to enterprise web application development and now moving on to data engineering (data mining, machine learning).

mrrrgn• 11 years ago

"Web development is like an entry point for programming these days"

Web development is just a _type_ of development. You're creating a hierarchy where none aught to exist.

I've known many system programmers who said the same thing about data engineering: "what kind of a lame made up job is that? They write Python and SQL queries, wow, that's barely programming."

It's all non-sense. You can employ techniques which vary over a wide range of sophistication to create web pages, embedded systems, or ETL pipelines. There is no clear cut hierarchy.

source: Have worked as a web dev, data warehouse engineer, and release engineer.

mikekchar• 11 years ago

Sometimes you need someone who knows every detail of whatever system. It can really pay off and you are willing to throw money and titles to get someone good. It doesn't mean they are a great senior dev, but if you need that person, then you need that person.

I've done embedded work, application work and now I'm doing web development. I often seen the "5 year senior wannabes". Hell, after 5 years of work, I was one of them! I refer to my old self as a "hotshot ass hole programmer". They are common.

These days, I think a junior developer is someone who needs assistance to get their job done. An intermediate developer is one who can get everything done without assistance (although they may still benefit from assistance!). A senior developer is someone who can bring up everybody else's level -- getting assistance in this seems to be a critical prerequisite for success).

I tell this to people on my team, but again it is hard to judge your own effectiveness. There is a lot of hubris. I know -- been there, done that, slept in the t-shirt for over 20 years. Thinking about it, I think the key piece of experience that can help you be a good senior developer is to watch a system that you built collapse under its own weight. Coming to grips with the idea that all of those things you really believed would definitely lead to wonderful software were just... wrong (and it doesn't matter what it was that you believed here).

Terr_2• 11 years ago

I think the key piece of experience that can help you be a good senior developer is to watch a system that you built collapse under its own weight.

Yeah, I like to assume this is the weakness of job-hopping/stack-changing candidates (as opposed to my not-so-glamorous self.)

Everything you build will fail and need replacement somehow, but you can't improve if you're always gone before it happens.

It echoes the same criticism we (tech-folks) often level at short-sighted Dilbertian managers.

benihana• 11 years ago

For me, John Allspaw's article On Being A Senior Engineer[1] lays it all out pretty well. It addresses the issues we all seem to have with this article better than I could.

Generation X (and even more so generation Y) are cultures of immediate gratification. I’ve worked with a staggering number of engineers that expect the “career path” to take them to the highest ranks of the engineering group inside 5 years just because they are smart. This is simply impossible in the staggering numbers I’ve witnessed. Not everyone can be senior. If, after five years, you are senior, are you at the peak of your game? After five more years will you not have accrued more invaluable experience? What then? “Super engineer”? Five more years? “Super-duper engineer.” I blame the youth of our discipline for this affliction.

http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engi...

pbowyer• 11 years ago

They have been working in the same job, with the same technologies, on the same product but when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer “Because I have been coding for 5 years”.
The sad fact is that these people have not been aware of the realities of the industry they have been working in. Their job and their job security is no longer secure. Never let this become you!

It sounds like the author values language/framework knowledge above expertise. Speaking as a backend dev I find as you move up in seniority it becomes impossible to keep up with the latest technologies. Learning management skills, being move involved in architecting and business development all take time. You may end up doing code reviews, project management and cleaning up the 'legacy' (read broken) parts of the system. Does that make you less valuable?

To a company that insists on every part of their project being built in the latest cool language/framework (and yes, I still class NodeJS as this) then yes. To a pragmatic company, which may choose NodeJS if it's the best fit, or Rails, or PHP, or Java - no.

We're back at the skills vs language debate, one which I thought has been done to death.

CmonDev2• 11 years ago

NodeJS? That thing is already dead. You must have a year of IO.js experience.

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

IO.js? That is so yesterday. You need to have at least three years of fozbaz.js experience, which has a pre-alpha release tomorrow.

dodyg• 11 years ago

Linus has been working in the same job, with the same technologies, on the same product ...

aburan282• 11 years ago

This is a debate I am having right now. Should I go the sysadmin route (hadoop clusters, etc), become a data scientist, or choose to get into cybersecurity. I have been leaning against choosing the web development career path

wyclif• 11 years ago

DevOps! ;-)

falcolas2• 11 years ago

Trite, but accurate. This role is currently in high demand, with correspondingly good salaries. It's worth noting, though, that companies expect DevOps to do more more operational tasks than programming or procedure generation.

There aren't a lot of folks who understand how to administer a modern Linux system anymore; even companies using AWS or Rackspace or GAE will need someone versed in the arcane ways of System Administration as they grow.

aburan282• 11 years ago

I fear there is a new generation of developers who have jumped into programming using nodejs as their core language and fit this description you mention "On more occasions than I could count, the candidate for this type of role would have some cool technologies listed on their resume and completed an adequate coding test which is part of our hiring procedure.". If you don't know algorithmic complexity, how to run all sorts of tests, or have any clue about security measures but can set up a nodejs express webserver in 5 mins you are a script kiddie at best. Unfortunately these type of developers are now getting jobs because its the new web development buzzword

thaumasiotes2• 11 years ago

Some people love to cook in their spare time. Would these people be as enthusiastic about cooking if they were doing it for 40+ hours a week every week and there was a superior telling them what and how to cook?
The honest answer for most people is no!

I find this weird. I advertised for calculator program requests in high school because I wanted someone to tell me what to code. (There were no takers. One guy wanted a program to convert decimal numbers into fractions, but that's already built into the calculators.) To me writing a program is solving a puzzle. You can't do that unless there's a puzzle to solve.

I was baffled and enraged by the prevalence of the question "what do you want to work on?" and its related forms in job interviews. My philosophy of work is that the whole point of having a boss is that they tell you what to do and you do it. Sure, I don't want to fix cars, but that's why I'm applying as a software developer and not a mechanic.

bsdpython• 11 years ago

You can literally work on software for any industry, company or government in the world. I would think you would have some sort of preference. At the least you should be interested enough in the place your are interviewing at to find out what they do and and then tell them you are interested in working on that. Otherwise you just come off as a mercenary or desperate.

ssully• 11 years ago

The thing is some people really don't care what they work on. As long as the pay is good and they are getting to program(or whatever other task they enjoy doing), the actual application doesn't matter.

thaumasiotes2• 11 years ago

Otherwise you just come off as a mercenary

You are a mercenary. That's the idea of a job. You do something, they pay you.

yourad_io• 11 years ago

That point is one of the few that I agree with.

I perceived the emphasis as being on the how to work. I once worked for a company that "believed" in "the one" PHP framework (developed in-house; terrible), "the one" cache (memcached - had to fight to get redis for the richer structures that we really needed; lost), "the one" DB (MySQL 5.0?), no staging environments for devs (we won a battle and allowed ourselves to run vagrant! woo), etc.

In your car mechanic analogy: you don't get to pick what cars to work on, and this is completely reasonable. But, it should be up to you & your team to pick the tools. If some idiot in the company once managed to undo a bolt with chopsticks and liekd it so much that he made it a company mandate, you'll soon be looking for another garage.

Long story short: I've seen the extreme of non-techies micro-managing technical decisions, and it is extremely frustrating. <lablab.png>

itsbits• 11 years ago

This applies not just to Web Development...Mobile Dev is most challenging as well...As a iOS developer, every iOS update, there will be new features..and lot of guidelines..now even new Programming Language...

CmonDev2• 11 years ago

TL;DR: glorified web developer only likes his kin.

UK-AL2• 11 years ago

This is why development is ageist. Keeping programming skills up to date after work, and spending hours after work trying different languages and libraries is fine when your young.

Its not so fine, when you have kids and a wife to look after.

Probably have about an hour to myself everyday.

marvin2• 11 years ago

It's not only ageist. As long as developers keep accepting that they have to spend 15 hours a month on their own dime just to keep up, it's outright exploitative. Developers are generally expected to keep current in the breakneck technology rat race with no support from their employing organization. This could (maybe) be considered reasonable if technology moved more slowly, but not the way the world of computer software works.

It's one thing if you're a consultant in a web development position where your team is constantly jumping from the previous best practice to the next; keeping up in such an environment is easy and you'll get paid to do it. The problem occurs if you're in (e.g.) a back-end position where your job duties require you to focus on slower-moving technologies that might have lesser demand in the market. What happens if you lose your job after 5 years? Unless you spent all your weekends working with the latest hot frameworks, you're (mostly) screwed.

There was a good essay a while ago which stated that software developers need a professional association. If we were organized, we could put forward the very reasonable demand that a small portion of our on-the-clock time should be spent for education. I think this is a requirement if we are not aiming for a world of 40-year old burnouts and early retirees.

alphapapa• 11 years ago

That's a very good point. Other fields have Continuing Education, sabbaticals, in-service training, etc. (e.g. medicine, education).

But then, computers and software change so much more rapidly--and arbitrarily--than other fields, that it's very different. Software is as much art as science, and a lot of "keeping up-to-date" with software is simply learning whatever is popular at the moment, not what is necessarily more advanced, better, or newly discovered.

tbrownaw• 11 years ago

As long as developers keep accepting that they have to spend 15 hours a month on their own dime just to keep up, it's outright exploitative.

Why? How is this any different from working an extra... 4 hours a week? It sounds like long hours are fairly common, and we tend to be on salary and not get paid extra for that either.

gaius6• 11 years ago

If you've done C++ or DB2 or something for 5 years or 10 years or 20 years you will have no trouble finding the next gig. Because these skills genuinely do take time to develop, and people with the tenacity to do it are rare.

robotkilla4• 11 years ago

We need a union.

falcolas2• 11 years ago

It will not happen anytime soon.

For one, (speaking as an American) unions are sneered at as a waste of resources by your average citizen.

This leads to the second problem: there will always be a pretty decent sized group who do not believe in unions, meaning companies will have a choice in who to hire. It's usually not in a corporation's best interest to hire a unionized worker, at least not a corporation which views "profit" as their primary goal.

Terr_2• 11 years ago

Unions are suitable for measurable and substitutable tasks, but most programming is actually custom work.

Show me a unionizeable programming job and I'll show you something that's about to be replaced with a library or shrink-wrap app.

A comparison to law/medicine is more appropriate.

Dewie• 11 years ago

Sounds like a race to the bottom.

gaius6• 11 years ago

It's pointless too. Every new language that comes out, everyone reinvents the wheel in it. You see it here on HN, on the front page[1] every day <some piece of software that has existed for years> now rewritten in <trendy language of the day> and everyone cheers, but is this program doing anything that it didn't do before? Is it faster, better, more reliable? Generally no, and this happens in the workplace too, just reinventing the wheel over and over and over again.

We could have stuck with C, and concentrated on developing new things, but the programming community is like Hollywood remaking the same film over and over with different stars.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203045 [2]

[2] That was easy to find...

gexla• 11 years ago

Reality. Talk to people. Help people. Preferably, help people make money. You'll be okay.

shamney• 11 years ago

what new technological advances in back end web development have occurred in the last five years? why should senior developers spend their spare time learning new ways of doing exactly the same thing?

philipn• 11 years ago

I like pretty much everything someone takes the time to write about development, but this rubbed me the wrong way. I'm not sure what it is exactly the author is trying to express here: that engineers need to stay current on new, hot technologies? Everyone knows that. But then he seems to deride people who, based on his interviewing, haven't used a <new technology X> in production / in a new project.

You can't have it both ways. You need to find a way to evaluate people and, through that evaluation, grok whether or not they can pick up a new technology that they aren't already familiar with. If you can't figure that out, your interview process has failed. Think about it: the complexity and difficulty of your own problems vastly exceed the difficulty a senior engineer faces learning a few new frameworks or APIs. If not, you're doing something pretty trivial.

The best people I've ever worked with weren't people who a priori understood the technology stack we were working with -- instead, they have been seasoned engineers who know how go out and learn, and then apply what they already know in a new environment. This seems so obvious I feel silly even writing it down here, but this is on the front page, so it must be resonating with folks.

What tptacek has said about .NET developers working at IT departments at huge organizations really rings true here. If you immediately write someone off because they work with technologies you don't work with[1] then you're doing it wrong.

1. Assuming you're not looking for a quick, contracted hired gun for something fairly straightforward.

sfk• 11 years ago

It's the pop culture mentality which is now worse than ever:

[2004] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

"So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture."

"Like I said, it’s a pop culture. A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn’t have to have any particular musical merits. I think a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditious gap-filling."

jared314• 11 years ago

It's been said that the population of programmers doubles every ~5 to 10 years. And, that loosely correlates to the hype cycle of "hot technologies".

I don't think it's possible to avoid a pop culture with that many young and inexperienced programmers, especially with a cultural emphasis on self-training over mentoring.

mkozlows• 11 years ago

Exactly what you said. The other part that got me was his "as an entry-level programmer, be prepared for grinding, endless tedium."

Maybe that's how his workplace treats junior devs, but the reality is that a developer with very little experience but a lot of skill is someone who can add a lot of value, and can find a workplace where they'll be able to do that. If you try to make a great junior dev "pay their dues," well, they have better options, with companies that will use them more sensibly.

dcosson• 11 years ago

I see where you're coming from, but in context I don't think the author was advocating for treating junior devs badly on purpose. More like everyone ends up banging their head against the wall sometimes as a developer, and you should be prepared for that if you're a new programmer and considering doing it as a career. In some sense it is paying dues but it's not imposed by anyone else, it's just that the less experienced you are the more often you get stuck.

His related advice actually really resonated with me, basically just to be humble.

"However with one or maybe two of the students I sensed overbearing confidence that now that could write some code and create prototypes they were valuable commodities in the industry."

I've also come across this kind of person who's sure they can do no wrong, and there's no one worse to bring into an organization. Anybody that's gonna come in and do things their own way, not bothering to spend time learning how the team and codebase works and why, will cause a lot of friction. But when it's a junior dev it can be a lot more destructive because "their own way" will often be flat out bad as opposed to just incongruent with the way the rest of the team works.

frostmatthew• 11 years ago

The other part that got me was his "as an entry-level programmer, be prepared for grinding, endless tedium."

Tediousness is in the eye of the beholder. I enjoy coding, and as a junior developer (~3 years exp.) I get to spend the majority of my time doing that.

When I look at the more senior developers all I see is that the better you get at writing software the less they have you write. Their days are filled with meetings, emails, triaging bugs, and reviewing other people's code.

datashovel2• 11 years ago

If this is the case, it sounds like OP does not adhere to "KISS" or "DRY" principles. On the contrary, anyone who is going to take up space in my office better not be engaging in "endless tedium". It's a sure sign they're not doing their job right.

michaelchisari2• 11 years ago

If you immediately write someone off because they work with technologies you don't work with[1] then you're doing it wrong.

I've had a hell of a time interviewing for just this reason. For the first set of interviews, I was emphasizing my experience with patterns as opposed to technologies. That didn't work. I was routinely dismissed, despite decades of industry experience.

When I decided to grind through the latest buzzwords, and build a few sample apps, that's when interviewers got much more positive.

It's not how I would have interviewed people, and I do agree with you and tptacek, but it was an eye opening experience on how to play the game.

aswanson3• 11 years ago

HR folks and interviewing engineers don't get this. Idioms, best practices and methodologies should be sought in senior people. Buzzword hiring shops are likely full of bad people to work with. Its a signal of lack of intelligence and perspective organizationally.

bbody2• 11 years ago

The obsession with experience in Technology X always reminds me of the story recruiter who turned down someone for not having 10+ years of Rails experience (http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/you-cant-have-more-...).

ritchiea• 11 years ago

It may be frustrating and require a lot of patience on your end, but if you look at it in another light it may be a sign you don't want to work at that company.

analog312• 11 years ago

To me, it's interesting that an article on Web development is hosted on Google Docs. This is not to point out an irony, but that like any technology, web development can be democratized pretty rapidly. The website for my side business is hosted on a similar platform.

What was considered best in class 5 years ago is literally frowned upon now as the technologies and the standard of our applications have evolved rapidly.

Moreover, what was considered best in class 5 years ago can now be set up by a non-expert.

bbody2• 11 years ago

My guess is that the author is afraid their website can't handle a HN view influx.

analog312• 11 years ago

That's perfectly fair. They might also not want to use their employer's website for their personal writings. And using the right technology for the job is a good attribute.

datashovel2• 11 years ago

"The sad fact is that these people have not been aware of the realities of the industry they have been working in".

IMO the observations provided by the OP are not sound reasoning for the above conclusion.

In a recent gig where I was responsible for helping the company hire new developers I made a conscientious effort to avoid making such sweeping generalizations. Web development is one of the most diverse fields that I know of. So much so that in my mind you can't assume a qualified employee has ever touched the specific technologies you use in your stack.

I think the hiring practices described by the OP may be the dinosaur here.

thejosh• 11 years ago

Okay, so he doesn't like that someone is a senior developer because they have been coding for 5 years. Fair enough, I guess.

Then they go onto say that you need to keep your technology current, and always be moving on. Okay....

So how does one become a senior in his position when you're always suppose to be moving on? By being a master with PHP? Not much has survived/been popular for >5 years that will make him happy.

graycat• 11 years ago

My take is different:

For "Web development as a career", the OP seems mostly to mean as an employee. Then I'd say, go down that road if you have to, but ASAP learn the business side, get your own software development environment (likely you already have it) in your own room at home, and then just be a sole proprietor in business much as a guy who owns and runs, say, a pizza shop, is a CPA, mows grass and plows snow, is a plumber or electrician, a car repair guy, an auto body guy, etc.

Then you get some big advantages:

(1) You are the one who gets the revenue and, thus, keeps the earnings.

(2) Likely for each dollar of revenue, you have lower overhead than any employer and, thus, get more money. In particular, you get to cut out the fraction of the revenue going to the owners, managers, marketing guys, lawyers, HR, landlords, business insurance agencies, etc.

(3) You have some tax advantages, often well known to sole proprietors.

(4) For your technical qualifications, you only have to learn and use what you actually need and find useful. So, you don't have to play buzz word ice hockey with some HR clown who doesn't know fixed from float but has a checklist of C++, Python, Ruby, MongoDB, Jason, HTML5, ....

Point (4) is crucial: Likely your customers just want their Web site developed, running, and occasionally revised. Okay, that's what you need to be able to do. But, you get to select the framework, languages, libraries, development environment, etc. If you need a new tool, then, sure get, learn, and use it. But you don't have to spend a lot of time learning, say, HTML5 or SVG if you don't need to use them yet.

"The business of America is business", and in practice from crossroads up to the largest cities a lot of sole proprietor small businesses.

mtrpcic• 11 years ago

Just wanted to note that this was posted to the CSCareerQuestions subreddit[1] 6 days ago, and there's a bit of discussion there that may interest people as well.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2yb11f/i...

AnonymousRetard• 11 years ago

What has that google page turned into xD

Web Development as a career – the realities

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