Ask HN: anyone in SF need a kickass frontend developer?

My current job is pissing me off. Most of the people I work with don't seem to have a clue as to what they are doing. I'm given a "must do next-day" priority, then the next day they change their mind and I'm off to work on whatever else they think is important today. We're a community-focused site and yet there's little care shown for site size, future extensibility, best practices, building for the future, etc.

I have spent over a year trying to improve the situation, promoting better development practices, evangelizing community oriented features, and more. The other frontend developer and I are constantly ignored and major frontend decisions are being made by the lead of engineering who is a straight "Java expert". Frontend dev is a completely separate team with our own manager, and yet nothing is done to respect or even solicit our ideas and opinions.

I'm just tired of regretting waking up each morning and slogging uphill through a mountain of mud and not having achieved anything at the end of the day.

I want to work on something important, where we can build and iterate fast and where I can have a hand in shaping the future of what I'm working on.

I do a lot of side experimental projects ranging from better CSS and javascript techniques to building around public APIs and experimenting with new languages. For example, I've been working pretty heavily for the last 2 months on implementing a server-side javascript environment based on V8 and got an API proxy working in Google App Engine 2 nights ago in a few hours. (I've never used nor touched Python before that). I released a Twitter promo tool on Google Code a couple weeks ago (http://code.google.com/p/fathomer/). I want to be in a place where if I am working on something cool on the side, there's a chance that it could be used and further adopted by the business.

startup may be one of your option, join one or start one and be ready for low pay, high fun and may be some equity ... :-)

If you are seriously looking to go to SF you should have no problem. I was looking for positions last year and the east coast just kept calling. That said, you will be working for a start up given your requirements which lends itself to the very condition you are describing. You'll have a ton of fun, learn a lot, but eventually the mess will hit the fan and you'll have unrealistic timetables and a grab bag of management woes.

Building the future is an excellent goal and something to strive for, but if you want stability and dependable management I'd head for corporate America. They have the capital to hire decent managers, train you for free, and give you realistic deadlines. Couple that with realistic hours, and maybe you'll have more time to experiment.

Zed Shaw put it perfectly, "Fight your hardest not to be a corporate coder: your life as a geek or a coder should be all about exploring some new domain that no one else gets -- you can only go to conferences and talk to other geeks about what you do. A corporate coder works only on the stuff he's supposed to on one language, and never touches code otherwise. You should go home and do something fun with technology."

http://vimeo.com/2723800

A disclaimer, I work for a giant corporation. I work on things that I think don't matter, but to the people on the ground building our products, the tools I help build and deploy mean a lot. They prevent accidents, environmental hazards, and close calls.

Then I go home and hack on Python, PHP, .NET, and Arduino. And play Rockband.

Disqus is looking for one. We're in SOMA (2nd & Howard) - shoot me an email: daniel@disqus.com

Upvoted to help you out. Good luck!