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Web Development as a career – the realities

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Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#21

Post by madaxe_again »

CmonDev wrote: post #15
pbowyer wrote: post #8

> They have been working in the same job, with the same technologies, on the same product but when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer “Because I have been coding for 5 years”. > The sad fact is that these people have not been aware of the realities of the industry they have been working in. Their job and their job security is no longer secure. Never let this become you! It sounds like the author val…

NodeJS? That thing is already dead. You must have a year of IO.js experience.

IO.js? That is so yesterday. You need to have at least three years of fozbaz.js experience, which has a pre-alpha release tomorrow.

Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#22

Post by madaxe_again »

rifung wrote: post #6

"when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer 'Because I have been coding for 5 years'." Maybe 5 years is insufficient, to be considered senior, but isn't the amount of time you've been coding what defines how senior you are? I get that technologies come and go and you have to stay up to date, but I would think that if someone were looking for a senior developer they would be looking for someone with a l…

Yeah, not the case at all.

Seniority means, to us at least, experience (i.e. beyond "don't know what you don't know" and at the "know I know some stuff but there's a lot I don't know" stage) and the ability to rapidly pick up and grok new tech, languages, ways of working, and what have you.

It's not about a certain level of experience in Node.js, or whether you have used the shiny new tech that came out last Thursday - it's about whether you can.

Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#24

Post by thirdtruck »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #14
rifung wrote: post #6

"when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer 'Because I have been coding for 5 years'." Maybe 5 years is insufficient, to be considered senior, but isn't the amount of time you've been coding what defines how senior you are? I get that technologies come and go and you have to stay up to date, but I would think that if someone were looking for a senior developer they would be looking for someone with a l…

To me, the 'Senior' adjective in a job title corresponds to the individual's position within the organization that has bestowed that title, not necessarily to the individual's abilities compared to the larger community.

I agree. Based on the titles I've seen in my recent job searches, they're incredibly inconsistent between companies anyway.

Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#25

Post by thirdtruck »

UK-AL wrote: post #20
gaius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years! A career these days is 40-45 years. If you are "senior" in only 5 then where do you expect to go from there? 20 years experience, on a wide range of technologies, in a variety of roles, then we'll talk senior. Until then calling yourself "senior" just invites people not to take you seriously.

Where I am, you have to call yourself senior to get a salary comparable to other professions.

Exactly what I've seen have and experienced first-hand (as verified in recent salary negotiations). It's a systemic software industry issue, a peacock game we're expected to play in order to get ahead.

Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#26

Post by bsdpython »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #11

> Some people love to cook in their spare time. Would these people be as enthusiastic about cooking if they were doing it for 40+ hours a week every week and there was a superior telling them what and how to cook? > The honest answer for most people is no! I find this weird. I advertised for calculator program requests in high school because I wanted someone to tell me what to code. (There were no takers. One guy wan…

You can literally work on software for any industry, company or government in the world. I would think you would have some sort of preference. At the least you should be interested enough in the place your are interviewing at to find out what they do and and then tell them you are interested in working on that. Otherwise you just come off as a mercenary or desperate.

Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#27

Post by marvin »

UK-AL wrote: post #17

This is why development is ageist. Keeping programming skills up to date after work, and spending hours after work trying different languages and libraries is fine when your young. Its not so fine, when you have kids and a wife to look after. Probably have about an hour to myself everyday.

It's not only ageist. As long as developers keep accepting that they have to spend 15 hours a month on their own dime just to keep up, it's outright exploitative. Developers are generally expected to keep current in the breakneck technology rat race with no support from their employing organization. This could (maybe) be considered reasonable if technology moved more slowly, but not the way the world of computer software works.

It's one thing if you're a consultant in a web development position where your team is constantly jumping from the previous best practice to the next; keeping up in such an environment is easy and you'll get paid to do it. The problem occurs if you're in (e.g.) a back-end position where your job duties require you to focus on slower-moving technologies that might have lesser demand in the market. What happens if you lose your job after 5 years? Unless you spent all your weekends working with the latest hot frameworks, you're (mostly) screwed.

There was a good essay a while ago which stated that software developers need a professional association. If we were organized, we could put forward the very reasonable demand that a small portion of our on-the-clock time should be spent for education. I think this is a requirement if we are not aiming for a world of 40-year old burnouts and early retirees.

Re: Web Development as a career – the realities

#29

Post by yourad_io »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #11

> Some people love to cook in their spare time. Would these people be as enthusiastic about cooking if they were doing it for 40+ hours a week every week and there was a superior telling them what and how to cook? > The honest answer for most people is no! I find this weird. I advertised for calculator program requests in high school because I wanted someone to tell me what to code. (There were no takers. One guy wan…

That point is one of the few that I agree with.

I perceived the emphasis as being on the how to work. I once worked for a company that "believed" in "the one" PHP framework (developed in-house; terrible), "the one" cache (memcached - had to fight to get redis for the richer structures that we really needed; lost), "the one" DB (MySQL 5.0?), no staging environments for devs (we won a battle and allowed ourselves to run vagrant! woo), etc.

In your car mechanic analogy: you don't get to pick what cars to work on, and this is completely reasonable. But, it should be up to you & your team to pick the tools. If some idiot in the company once managed to undo a bolt with chopsticks and liekd it so much that he made it a company mandate, you'll soon be looking for another garage.

Long story short: I've seen the extreme of non-techies micro-managing technical decisions, and it is extremely frustrating.

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