I Am Happy Not to Be a Web Developer Anymore

For a long time I've felt like software is really just a blue collar job, but instead of turning a wrench it's pushing little plastic buttons.

I like this aspect of it. It feels humble and practical. We're plumbers, but we pipe data not fluid. We don't have any science of data dynamics yet, so it's all word of mouth cargo culting. It's like being a plumber in the bronze age if plumbing was extremely valuable.

As to the ease of "and convince someone to hire you in a strategic business role". Yes, this is a job that people have, however it's extremely competitive and hard to keep. There's always someone else who can spit out MBA salad and who wants your job. I wouldn't want to be a BS artist, it's too stressful.

I got into a web development a few years ago, and I am so... what would should I use? Almost euphoric that I never had to learn to work around IE6 or Internet Explorer in general; that web browsers mostly support the same feature set now (shame on Safari for still not supporting Ogg, and on Edge for not supporting AVIF), and ECMAScript 6 being widely available is a blessing.

What industry hasn’t changed tremendously since 2000? Look at Vulkan vs OpenGL 2. Or C++23 vs C++03. Or C# today vs C# in 2000. Or even Java today vs Java then. Or CPUs of today vs CPUs of 2000. Those gosh darned hardware engineers keep making this stuff overly complex!

I find it funny when people from other domains complain about web development changing so quickly, when literally every other domain changes at about the same pace. React has been around since 2013 now, that’s the same age as Rust. Of course if you’re not in the industry and actively following it, it will feel foreign to you if you revisit it in 10 years. That doesn’t mean your industry hasn’t changed, it just means you haven’t noticed it because you’ve been following it all this time.

And you can still use plain JS, HTML, and CSS. And a lot of things have gotten way better using vanilla tools. You don’t have to use a super complicated stack if you don’t want to.

Yes, the update politics of ember is a good example for all. But it comes normally with a cost (features, speed, better solutions, whatever.... don't know currently enough about ember to form a judgment there).

I used ember too for a little own project, when it was version 1 (ONE), but i can't remember today why i not used it anymore.

Developers confuse technical stack (the how) with the why (what business value is my solution delivering).

There are just more choices today. You don't query for the latest stack and work back words.

Are you building a dog house or a skyscraper? If its a dog house use vanilla js or whatever works. If your building a skyscraper then use a react stack or something that has wide developer support since now your working on a large team on a large web application and the requirements have changed.

Server side rendering for example is to solve the issue of first load but is that actually something the business must have? It also adds CPU processing to your back end and more complexity. Is the trade off worth it for your business?

The reason the business pays us money is so we learn the trade offs and make the correct technical decisions, not that we blindly grab the new hot.

Most hacker news links I see like this is a developer confusing their world (small shop, internal IT dev, large shop, enterprise development, contract work for medium size business, FANG company etc) with the whole world and think there is one solution that applies to all worlds.