God, I hope so. I guess I can always go with my fallback of dolphin trainer if this whole web developer thing stops panning out.
Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
211–220 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to wr…
Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipeli…
This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path).
It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once.
I work mainly in .Net and the similar problem I see is devs who don't even know that console apps exist, let alone how to make them, which simplifies prototyping new code immensely.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I no longer believe this. You should try interviewing "software engineers" that claim to have 10 years of experience architecting and coding in various languages and cannot write a function that doubles the value of each number in an array.
You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary. The…
> You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array.
You shouldn't extrapolate your own experience into "never" or "always". I have twice your experience, and I've had insultingly simple questions like this. Amazon asked me to do fizzbuzz, for crying out loud.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code. I no longer believe this. I think “people who cannot code” is a myth perpetuated by those who gain something out of it. People who’s business or job is to filter candidates, people who’s business is to sell their own “improved” version of training, people in need of an ego boost and actually, mainly by people who just repeat it cause they heard it…
I'm skeptical of that trope also. I remember that stack overflow fizzbuzz post, but I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz. I've also never been asked to do anything as basic as code a fizzbuzz example in an interview. Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would b…
> I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz
Me neither, in the real world, but I have seen a couple of excruciating mock interview videos where the "candidate" was unable to complete the fizzbuzz task. I think this might be a result of people thinking that learning to be a developer involves following along with video tutorials on Udemy, and that as soon as some threshold is reached, they should be ready to look for work.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#215Yes. I am the co-founder of Lambda School - (YC S17 - a CS education where the school doesn’t get paid unless you get a good job). Right now we see about 3 students/day get hired. You’ll likely hear a lot of people talking about how the market for juniors is flooded. That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code . If you can actually be a productive employee I literally know 100 companies that…
>If you can actually be a productive employee I literally know 100 companies that will hire you today. As a self-taught engineer you have to convince them of that, which mostly means a solid portfolio, but there is insane demand. And if you get even one year of experience you won’t believe how many opportunities open up. This just isn’t true. The industry has become insanely competitive for anyone but the top level s…
> This just isn’t true.
Yes it is (but you need to be overall personable and have good communication skills). After 1 year at a small dev shop I started with 0 years of experience, I got an offer at a big company you've heard of (not FAANG but public) for double. I didn't take it because I got bad vibes from the management but it was great to know I could. I say this not to brag that I'm brilliant because I am decidedly NOT brilliant - there have always been better coders than me everywhere I've worked since.
However, I had some PM experience before learning development which helped my "business" bona-fides. If you are 19 going from taco bell to a bootcamp I imagine proving that you can fit into an actual business culture is more important to getting you a job than coding ability (which is the min bar).
Truthfully, if you have 3 years exp with solid references, you should have recruiters knocking down your door with (mostly) bad offers of underpaying shops. There's no reason you shouldn't unless theres big red flags on your resume.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky. Exactly this. I'm mid-level, trying to switch jobs. Several front-end javascript positions I interviewed for asked me anything from pretty tough algorithms to "how does Angular do namespacing" to object-oriented questions relating to Java to how to style a page and add event listeners to it without a…
Amen on getting rid of the H1Bs! Not only would doing soclear out the deadwood, the improvements in skills, capabilities, communication ability, and critical thinking would dramatically slash the true cost of software development.
I've worked with amazing H1Bs. The problem is the great ones are always underpaid and by the time and the bad ones are encouraged to do anything to keep their jobs because their entire future is on the line.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#217>Six months sounds like a lot No, it does not. Learning new skill from scratch takes time. You're trying to master 2 new, orthogonal, in some sense contradictory skills: web development, and self-promotion (to find your place in "the job market"). Take a deep breath.
Considering how little I knew after a 4-year Bachelor's degree, 6 months of nights and weekends is insignificant.
Think about it this way, its less about learning everything you need to know, its learning enough about learning that you can learn the minimum and then learn even more once you pass the bar.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code. I no longer believe this. I think “people who cannot code” is a myth perpetuated by those who gain something out of it. People who’s business or job is to filter candidates, people who’s business is to sell their own “improved” version of training, people in need of an ego boost and actually, mainly by people who just repeat it cause they heard it…
I'm skeptical of that trope also. I remember that stack overflow fizzbuzz post, but I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz. I've also never been asked to do anything as basic as code a fizzbuzz example in an interview. Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would b…
By now, I think fizzbuzz has been around enough that people know it, have heard of it, and prepare enough to solve it.
I have started using variations of fizzbuzz or additional questions that builds on it and I find myself catching people who only know the fizzbuzz portion.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#219As others have pointed out there are generally two flavors of 'web developers' and I've been on both sides. Having worked at agencies, with outsourced talent, and building web apps with modern tools; there seems to be a divide between the self-taught and the educated.
I got a BS in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and all my web development learning and experience came from my own projects or on the job. It's been difficult for me to find an engineering or product management position despite having experience (one phone interview for ~25 applications). There's definitely more I can do on my part however this isn't unique to me.
Perhaps the fact that many companies have switched to automated screening systems to filter out all the junk resumes has made it harder to get interviews? To answer your question, the need in the market is there and if you are patient, your risk should be rewarded.
Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, web apps aren't websites. The distinction is pretty sharp when you move from a simple static old fashioned display to Amazon tier complexity where money is being transacted, log in information stored, orders updated, and a million more things besides. The big question is if the internet and its primary portals, the desktop browser and the smartphone, will reach the end of their tether. The only thing I could s…
Another risk I think is the automation of coding. It already happens all the time, and in principle coding should be the most automatable of anything. The only thing saving it is that it's very hard to automate the creation of good ideas or purposeful human intentions, which naturally inform most successful coding projects. There's also a bit of a conflict of interest, why would coders building automation systems wan…
This feels, unrealistic. Coding practices, tools and technology have minimally changed since the 70's.
Faster machines, but with each new language, you still have the baggage of design/code/compile/test/debug/refactor and the library/dependency hell that plagues things like oh, say Node.js with NPM, maven with Java, make with C/C++ etc. etc.
Then there is the flood of new "UI hotness libraries" in the JavaScript space alone. Pick one. wait 6 months and see what else is now the new hotness or if your current one has changed with a new major version release (Angular?).
There should be more folks like Bret Victor working with language teams in the FANG(+MS) companies to drive some further breakthroughs in reducing cognitive load and tool/library dependency complexities.
Where are this generation's Alan Kay and Jean-Marie Hullot types, pushing the envelope on software development environments?