Is there hope for people looking to break into software engineering if they don't like web development? From the outside at least it looks like all the jobs are full-stack roles. Is it some kind of right of passage? Any advice for someone who genuinely wants to break/transition into this profession but wants to avoid web apps?
Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#2Completely anecdotal - but most of the 'software developer' people I know wouldn't know where to start with anything 'web' (I'm sure they could figure it out though!). Whilst a lot of their work might be related to stuff that happens on the web, (like consumer banking, for instance) they're pretty exclusively dealing with the backend systems.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#3There is a huge amount of other work in the biz.
If you want to expand your skills right now get an Arduino, some LEDs and a handful of logic chips.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#4Software engineering is so much more than web dev.
Off the top of my head:
- devops
- security
- mobile apps
- desktop apps
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#5You could look at mobile apps. Just stay away from anything requiring a web view. Otherwise, you'll be messing around with web dev inside your mobile app.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#6Game development is even worse. Have you tried embedded? And there is always a huge unmet need for drivers.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#7How about data science or machine learning? Is there a career opportunity there?
There was a lot of buzz a few years ago. I’m not sure if it panned out.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#8When you say "Web development" do you mean building servers that are connected to the internet and ultimately do work because someone sent a request of some kind or do you mean building CRUD websites for e-commerce? I agree the latter is really boring, but there are a ton of jobs that do the former. Even jobs that _sound_ like they should be very web-centric don't feel that way if you aren't working on clients or handling HTTP.
My experience has been that places that ask for "fullstack" are generally small shops that don't want to hire specialists because their problems are product-centric, not engineering centric.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#9There are plenty of non-web jobs out there. I started in web and I'm actively trying to move away from it.
That said: web is a great way to get your feet wet. There's more to it than just making a page look pretty. You can get exposure to a ton of different problem domains and get a decent footing in many of them just by getting really good at web dev (particularly by working on sites/applications run by larger organizations).
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#10There is front-end and back-end. I've been in the back-end for more than a decade already and haven't touched front-end once. Back-end is more of processing and preparing the data which will be presented in the front-end.
Also, thanks for recommending https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.00.1-x/1T2014/course/ in one of your comments; it looks quite interesting.
In this day and age, there is tons of data being generated in institutions like stock trading data for a stock brokerage company or call record data for a telecom company. Usually these data needs to be parsed, summarized or analysed etc.. so there is a lot of back-end work that occurs.
Back-end processing is usually either OLTP (online transaction processing) or OLAP (online analytical processing). With OLTP, it is about the software performing some repetitive task that supports a business function. For example, with Amazon shopping; the software needs to record the order, reduce available inventory of the product, etc..
With OLAP, there is usually some analysis on the data that needs to be generated like a report showing Amazon orders that match a certain condition.