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Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#22Of course there are other jobs. I've never touched a web developer role, never touched JavaScript, never touched anything that generated html. There is plenty of software in the world. I came out of the Army 8 years ago and the sequence of roles I've done that didn't involve web dev include:
- Algorithmic trading implementation for a boutique hedge fund
- Ground processing for satellite imagery
- Tasking and orchestration of geointelligence product generation suites
- CI/CD pipeline and dev environment internal tooling and automation
- Platform engineering
- Unclassified to classified data scanning and transfer service
- Kubernetes cluster buildout and maintenance automation
All of these involved or still involve distributed systems sending requests and responses across a network, usually using http, but not once have I had to be concerned with executing code in a browser.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#23I want to thank everyone for their comments. I'm a long-time and avid Hacker News reader and this was my first real post I guess. The community here is really solid and is largely what got me hooked on programming.
All your responses -- from don't give up on web dev totally because it can open doors, to try embedded software (I hadn't even heard of the term until today) -- have given me so much to think about.
Thanks again, and I know what I'm getting myself for Christmas. An Arduino.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#24I'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.
Yeah that isn't completely false. However, frontend work is SO much better than it used to be. Having to support old versions of IE made everything suck for a while. We won't have to worry at all about IE at all soon: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/int.... That said, the testing story for frontend isn't as good as it could be. Cypress has gotten us really close to a place where frontend testing can have really good coverage. But it's not quite there yet IMO. All things considered, with a modern web stack, I think fullstack work is overall less stressful because web frameworks make it so you don't have to make big architecture decisions that you may deeply regret down the line. I do miss making those decisions because they are fun to think about, but having to make those decisions is a huge liability and source of stress IMO.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#25If you want to avoid web development, then choose to focus on languages that are rarely (if ever) used for that purpose.
I'd recommend you focus on C/C++. It will provide a great foundational knowledge that you can use in almost every other part of programming. Also, from what I have heard, it's actually hard to recruit junior developers in C/C++.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#26I'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, communi…
Probably because it's specialized enough that the available positions tend to be for experienced people, or those with degrees in related technical fields like EE.
I've been primarily an embedded developer for the majority of my 25+ years in the software field with occasional forays into desktop, web and app development.
The only newbie devs I've seen doing low-level MCU development already had backgrounds in EE or CS/SE and did some basic embedded programming in school. I've worked with a lot of desktop/web guys who made a fantastic transition to embedded, but they were coming into it with years of experience and they usually started at a higher level (e.g., working with UIs or databases or communication protocols).
Embedded is not the friendliest path if you're trying to break into software without a technical degree.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#27Game development is even worse. Have you tried embedded? And there is always a huge unmet need for drivers.
> And there is always a huge unmet need for drivers
There is? Who's paying for it?
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#28If you want to avoid web development, then choose to focus on languages that are rarely (if ever) used for that purpose. I'd recommend you focus on C/C++. It will provide a great foundational knowledge that you can use in almost every other part of programming. Also, from what I have heard, it's actually hard to recruit junior developers in C/C++.
I’d second this, there’s also a whole lot of cool products written in C/C++ that people tend to overlook. A lot of audio related software if you’re interested in music production.
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#29If you want to avoid web development, then choose to focus on languages that are rarely (if ever) used for that purpose. I'd recommend you focus on C/C++. It will provide a great foundational knowledge that you can use in almost every other part of programming. Also, from what I have heard, it's actually hard to recruit junior developers in C/C++.
You might end up working on the browser itself. ;)
Re: Ask HN: What if you hate web development?
#30I want to thank everyone for their comments. I'm a long-time and avid Hacker News reader and this was my first real post I guess. The community here is really solid and is largely what got me hooked on programming. All your responses -- from don't give up on web dev totally because it can open doors, to try embedded software (I hadn't even heard of the term until today) -- have given me so much to think about. Thanks…
If you are going down the embedded / IoT route. Get yourself an esp32 while you are at it and a bunch of different sensors.