Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 246 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#231

Post by scarface74 »

sinker wrote: post #205
ronilan wrote: post #146

Earlier 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’ve done a version of the fizzbuzz test when zone I interviewed someone - write s function that returns true if a number is even false otherwise.

Even after I explained what an odd number was they couldn’t do it.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#234

Post by profalseidol »

catwind7 wrote: post #223
tomc1985 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the market being flooded, I think it varies greatly depending on where you are and whom you are with. With my current job I am part of a competent team of smart people but on my last job it seems that IQ was in short supply, for candidates, vendors, and even our "partners". Even though the last job ended months ago, I'm still trying to unconvince myself that everyone in this world is stupid and incompetent, becaus…

Yeah totally. I have a friend who mostly works with the IT in big banks and pretty recently he told me he had to explain what "Git" was to a more senior eng. That was shocking to me but then again maybe I'm too steeped in webdev.

This company I'm working in right now has recently migrated from CVS to Git. Still stuck in XML hell though. And nobody understand the ginormous Ant build script.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#235

Post by tarsinge »

tracker1 wrote: post #189
mschaef wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever it's worth, their answer was pretty close to my immediate reaction when I saw the question. Maybe another way of phrasing the answer is that no, I don't think 'Web Dev' is a viable career option. This becomes even more true when viewed on a time scale of 10, 20, 30 years. (Tying to a specific technology brings the horizon in even further... Web Dev 20 years ago was CGI scripts, 10 years ago it was server…

Dunno, I started out with a lot of perl-cgi, and now do mostly react/redux/material-ui on the front end... I've picked up a lot of backend stuff over the years. SQL/PostgreSQL/Firebird/DB2/Oracle/mySQL, mongo, aws, azure, rethinkdb, rabbitmq, etc... The key is to not rest and constantly be learning/growing. That includes line of business knowledge. I love this kind of work. Writing learning software for airplane syst…

Since now the web interface is ubiquitous everything could be labelled as "web dev", but for me your examples are general "software dev".

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#236

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

hessproject wrote: post #122

The thing about web development is that the definition of "web developer" can vary wildly. Web development is a big field and can include a wide range of skills. Making a static html info page is web development. Building a SPA with a database and auth and user uploads and deploying it on aws/azure and scaling for a million users, also web development. If you are thinking along the lines of the first example, eg. the…

I'd add that even for digital applications that are not web-based (native apps, console games, etc), there is still a need to talk to a server.

So regardless of market fluctuations, server-side development will always be in demand, and server-side dev is a subset of "web development".

So yes, definitely, web development is a worthwhile field to go into.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#237

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

apazzolini wrote: post #151
ronilan wrote: post #146

Earlier 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 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.

I've been interviewing several engineers over the last year, for the first time ever. It's _amazing_ how right you are.

I would look at a resume and think "wow this person is gonna be amazing". And then I would ask them very very basic questions, and they would get them wrong.

I still don't know what to make of it, because it doesn't make any sense to me.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#238

Post by shath2018 »

There's still huge demand for these roles - two questions to ask yourself are 1) how do I stand out? and 2) do I enjoy it?

This is a great related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18862790#18865742

If you're interested in combining your coding skills with customer-facing/problem-solving responsibilities, Sales Engineers are in huge demand. Companies are desperate to recruit for this combo of talent because it's so rare.

I'm the founder of Flockjay (YC W19 - tech sales bootcamp that helps people break into tech, without code). We have students with coding experience who are doing incredible things - companies can't wait to hire them. Happy to chat more.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#239

Post by vram22 »

IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #222
dublin wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because for some, tools like awk, sed and perhaps grep are unknown skills. The focus is on pumping out Java or C++ folks who never were given assignments using said tools and therefore never knew or learned them. Python is the new Perl, not sure what the new awk is.

>Python is the new Perl, not sure what the new awk is.

Red, said sed.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#240

Post by vram22 »

mattmanser wrote: post #212
dublin wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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).

Sure it is taught. It's taught by some people ( including me - plug here for my Linux and Python courses, with testimonials: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html ) in their Unix / Linux courses, as examples of how to really put the classic (and oft-quoted) Unix philosopy + command-line tools + shell scripting to good use, synergistically ("write small tools to do one job each, well, and connect them by pipelines and I/O redirection, etc. etc.").

It's not even rocket science; bread-and-butter EDP/IT folks (programmers and even operators) (not just clued-in software engineers in product companies) have been using such scripts for decades, routinely, without thinking they are doing anything great or out of the ordinary. (And similarly for other OSs, I'm sure, such as Rexx on some platforms. Not sure what was used on Windows before PowerShell, maybe Perl and/or one of the Unix toolkit clones like MKS Toolkit or Cygwin or UWin - apart from clunky batch file language and DOS/Windows command-line commands).

It's just that it is not so well known nowadays among the (often mainly JS-using) generation, who even write CLI apps in Node.

>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.

It's their loss (and that of the industry), comes from not trying to learn about prior art.

There's even a name for it: NIH syndrome [1], and heck, even that is not new :) Dates from early IBM days or earlier ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

Post reply on HN