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Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

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Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#11

Post by drakonka »

I have been programming professionally for >10 years and even though I've done some personal web projects and did some freelance web dev very early on, I haven't done what I would classify as "web dev" professionally for around 10 years, until very recently.

I did do backend dev for the last year and a half which is part of web of course, but no front-end bits were touched. Most of my career has been spent working on desktop applications. I don't really know what advice to give you other than "don't apply for web dev roles". I see many non-web positions in my area, they don't seem scarce at all.

Switching to a frontend lean now has certainly been very interesting; there are fun challenges and interesting things to learn in all domains.

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#13

Post by throwaway888abc »

> Is there hope for people looking to break into software engineering if they don't like web development?

The technology has many aspect.

> From the outside at least it looks like all the jobs are full-stack roles.

Try to change your lenses. Not really at all.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-pat...

https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/development_submit...

https://www.indiehackers.com/

Godspeed and all

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#14

Post by ranuzz »

FullStack roles can transition into non-web development roles. You can branch out to tools development that revolve around web development. Maybe a devops or SRE kind or role if that is where your interest lies.

If you want to leave web development and anything related to it behind then I’ll suggest getting deep expertise in one of the programming languages you use as part of your job (python, java, typescript, etc) and then look for jobs where the core requirement is language expertise and product is not web app.

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#15

Post by archarios »

I'd recommend not entirely dismissing web work as an option. If you do web work, there will be so many more jobs available to you. The work may not be as exciting in some cases. However, it is still good, well paying, work. The work may be less stimulating overall, but I think it's also less stressful. Which gives me more energy for other things in my life that I value more. There's more to life than work.

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#16

Post by metabro »

There’s a ton of non web dev work at big companies. Anecdotally all my work has been in building data warehouses and data lakes.

Having said that, there will be some cross over with web tech and it’s not a bad idea to start there and end up on the back end of you don’t like it.

I used to work with analytical data that mainly came from mainframes and such with no interaction with the web. Then things changed and I had to understand things like json, restapi etc . For people with a web dev background this isn’t a big deal but for me I struggled a bit adapting.

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#17

Post by metabro »

melling wrote: post #7

How 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.

Yes there is but I think esp for sale it means different things at different places.

Big tech companies do hire a ton of data roles but they might not align with what people assume the role to be.

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#18

Post by Cerium »

I'm surprised there are not many answers pushing you to learn embedded software. I have never had a primarily web development role (my early roles had some web dev for embedded front-ends, but not consumer web). It is a wonderful field where you can really make am impact. Currently I work on medical robotics. Embedded software is a wide field too - you can learn operating systems, drivers, low level embedded, communication stacks, distributed systems, etc.

You can try it out by getting something like an Arduino (or rpi if you want to learn embedded Linux) and trying to automate something where you live.

Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?

#19

Post by hollerith »

archarios wrote: post #15

I'd recommend not entirely dismissing web work as an option. If you do web work, there will be so many more jobs available to you. The work may not be as exciting in some cases. However, it is still good, well paying, work. The work may be less stimulating overall, but I think it's also less stressful. Which gives me more energy for other things in my life that I value more. There's more to life than work.

>The work may be less stimulating overall, but I think it's also less stressful.

I cannot speak for the OP, but my hesitancy around front-end web work is that browsers seem like a mess, so I worry that my trying to build a reliable front end would tend to be too stimulating and too stressful for me.

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