Ask HN: How to get out of making CRUD apps?

- A basic app (just because it’s thousands LoC, doesn’t make it less of a CRUD app)

- Deployed on AWS/Azure (rare occasion GCP), using pretty much the same setup to deploy

- The difference is the copy - quite often even most of the styling is similar…

Only challenges so far came from having more customers on the app at the same time, but even then it leads to more conservative tech choices, nothing else of note.

Yes, I know my skillset is quite generic - heavily JS/Node/React based, with a few years of experience in Python and very light knowledge of some lower level languages (had some passing interest in Go, Rust, no commercial experience to back it up).

I went through quite a few industries, but at the end of the day, all of them just feel the same. Working on a platform for a hedge fund felt no different from building for a retailer or a real estate company. Everything behind the scenes is so much of the same that unless the devs intentionally made some random tech choice or decided to use a barely stable new framework - you could hardly tell them apart from code PoV.

I’ve tried startups - but majority of them, until a pretty late stage are mostly smoke & mirrors, where you do everything to acquire customers while pretty much lying about the capabilities of your tech. Can be fun in the beginning while figuring out what the product is, but so far, all of them end up being a CRUD app, just with a different skin. When going large corporate, you get an extremely small part of the bigger stack to work on, which might be interesting first time around, but gets old after changing the search bar for who knows how many times that year for marginal gains (yes, while the changes are marginal, I do realise they can translate into millions every month).

I’ve had little luck of going for roles that do not directly correlate with my current experience. It seems that recruiters have very little interest in talking about any roles other than ones that fit my current stack exactly (node/react/python). Even had one that was a bit more direct than others and blurted out - “Why would you want to change with so much experience in your current stack”. I get it, easy payday for them if they hire someone who can work full on from day 1, but there's nothing in it for me to encourage a change. Sadly, recruiters are often the gatekeepers for a lot of the roles and as far as I can tell, unless I’m an easy hire with experience in the stack being hired for - they have little interest in a “wildcard”.

So here’s the question - is there a way out?

Any experiences of a major transition and how did you pull it off?

Is contracting the only way - accept that I'll be making CRUD apps and might as well maximise income from that?

Of course it feels the same across apps and industries-- it's a concrete slab upon which you build things.

Add layers on top of that, such as:

- Data visualizations. You have data from your CRUD, so do something creative with it. If you're familiar with ReactJS, check out open source, free libraries such as: https://nivo.rocks/ and https://charts.ant.design/

- Data integrations. Depending on the business you're in, experiment with integrating your CRUD app with external data sources via REST API or GraphQL. For example, a CRM like Salesforce or Marketo. Or a REST API in a particular business domain. Or a Google product which a customer might use, such as google drive.

How’s your work environment? I’d encourage you to consider how much do you like your team, your leadership, growth opportunities other than just crud vs non crud.

I worked in big tech. Learned a ton. Made a bunch more money. Worked with some of the toxic people in the world. I mean, leadership was abusive. As I climbed the ladder, got coached on being an asshole to people.

Figure out your priorities. Grass isn’t greener.

Sounds like you have a comfy, easy, copy+paste way to make a living with good income you can use to pursue serious passions - that's the dream. At the end of the day, it's just a job.