Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice? • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by katsura » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #102

eu2usthrowaway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to PM you but don't know how, hence throwaway. I apologize for not using my real hacker handle. I've just graduated (did 3 IT study programs in total -- 6 years of studying, overkill yes, I didn't have any good career advise via my friends, family or uni). Do you help people from the EU to work in the US? If so, then I'd really consider applying to your school since I am noticing that I can't get there mysel…

We just launched in the EU yesterday, but immigration is very difficult right now, for obvious reasons.

Will you have classes in EU timezones as well? I have friends who would be interested in that.

Also, I noticed on the website that when I check a course it says that ISA option is available for EU citizens as well, but your FAQ says that it is for US only.

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

#172

Post by wvenable » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:02 PM UTC

cantthinkofone wrote: post #144

cantthinkofone wrote: post #138

Earlier 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…

> in principle coding should be the most automatable of anything

All coding is itself the act of automating something. I don't think there is a risk to developers as there is always more to automate. We use products that automate our own programming tasks to create more code to automate yet more things.

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

#173

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #160

cantthinkofone wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tend not to worry about programming automation, because I believe it has actually been going on for a long time with higher level languages. E.g. when programming was done at assembly level, the advent of C did not reduce the number of jobs, rather it made programming more powerful and created more jobs. Same with Java and 'automated' memory management. Same with Ruby on Rails, php, etc. By simplifying developers j…

I agree... but I just find that automation leads to more productivity which leads to more demand. There are always additional projects and features to be developed. The way development has focused in prioritizing features over handling technical debt, or adding bodies for features which escalates accumulating tech debt more quickly will always lead to more work.

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

#174

Post by cdnsteve » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

One important aspect is that this industry requires constant learning and keeping up to date. You must make this a priority. When I started CSS did not exist and there was no front-end or back-end, you were a webmaster. I learned how to make interactive CD roms and interactive kiosks with Macromedia Director in school....

Technologies you learn now will be outdated tomorrow. Learning is a journey, not a destination. Try to focus on the larger concepts since these generally carry over across technologies.

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

#175

Post by president » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

My prediction is that the tech industry will be resilient over time but getting a job in tech will get harder and harder. In the golden years of the web (early 2000s), all you needed was some experience and "passion" to get hired. These days, outside of specialized positions, getting a regular ol' CRUD job requires Leetcode and experience matters much less. Combine this with the fact that you are now competing with an ever-growing global talent pool, most of whom have masters/Phds and don't mind working 24/7, you can see where this trend is going.

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

#176

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

jspiral wrote: post #150

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…

As a hiring manager, my experience has been that the average unsolicited resume belongs to someone who can't implement fizzbuzz. (this has a lot to do with the population that spams resumes though i believe) My experience has also been that most raw junior candidates need significant handholding to implement anything into a typical production system at first, and that the learning curve from there varies greatly. Wha…

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 write at the time. Only one candidate had a working example, even then there were a couple bugs in the transform, but at least the process worked. It's surprising to me how many junior devs cannot do a simple ETL in a scripting language.

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

#177

Post by puranjay » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:10 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #80

avip wrote: post #14

>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.

My brother-in-law was doing a Master's in Chemistry. In May 2018 he knew next to nothing about CS. In November 2018, he landed a junior data scientist position at a prestigious healthcare company.

Granted, he's very smart and basically coded all day for 6 months, but I'd say it is possible for a motivated individual.

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

#178

Post by calibas » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

ronilan wrote: post #146

austenallred wrote: post #76

Yes. 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…

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've personally worked with a number of "web developers" who can barely code HTML/CSS. They tend to fall into two categories, people who use Wordpress themes/plugins to take care of everything they need, and people who outsource cheap programmers to do all the coding for them.

I don't know exactly how common either is, but I've run into both categories multiple times doing freelance work.

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

#179

Post by penguat » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #158

apazzolini wrote: post #151

Earlier 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…

we ask almost everyone the same thing, which can be resolved to one of the unimaginative but straightforward things above, but is not necessarily obvious at first glance. We fail the people who evidently can't code, not the people who fail to resolve it to the magic answer.

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

#180

Post by tracker1 » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #158

apazzolini wrote: post #151

Earlier 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…

I've seen both sides a number of times. Even when interviewing specifically those coming out of code-camp style organizations, there's probably 2/3 that never did anything in terms of discovery beyond what they were assigned. I'm not saying that anyone has to spend all their free time coding, but a bit of passion when starting out is the single best indicator of how a junior level developer will perform.

This other is title inflation where someone at junior-mid level has a senior title after 2-3 years of experience. It's all over the map. For every good developer, I've seen 2-3 bad developers. For every 10 good developers, you might get 1 great developer. For every 2 great developers, 1 has a personality that doesn't work well with others.

It's a challenge to build a team where you need to balance ability, room for growth with need. I also agree that the hiring practices outlined in "cracking the coding interview" are excessive for most environments. Most line of business applications will use tooling that abstracts some of the more difficult challenges. Cloud environments offer services that take care of many of the rest. In reality, there's more need for someone to have an understanding of when you might use a given SQL variant, Mongo or Cassandra (or any number of others), vs even thinking of creating your own systems.

In general, for "senior" javascript developers, I ask a single question. Something that's in every JS book from beginning to advanced that I've ever seen. And less than one in 10 give a complete answer, and less than half get it half right.