Web Development as a career – the realities
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Web Development as a career – the realities
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Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#2Nice Topic. Actually i'm in the web development field for past three years. The reality of the web development was difficult to understand.
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#3All good thoughts, but not specific to web dev! Applies to any career path you're serious about.
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#4As a recent student in a coding bootcamp I believe your essay is very informative. It will be useful as one of a guiding docs for beginners. Thank you
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#5One minor point I disagree with is mobile development. For certain apps it's extremely important... But there's a lot of complicated applications that don't work on mobile at all. So if you wanted to support mobile you'd have to design and build two separate applications. That requires a lot of resources and manpower. Another alternative is to hide most of the functionality that won't work well in mobile, but depending on what problems you solve, this could make your application useless.
As for the overall topic, I think I agree. It seems to me that server-side technologies are better researched and understood. But then you look at client-side technology, it's chaotic. Building and maintaining user interfaces is hard... Recently I've been playing around with flux and react, and I feel like it's definitely a step in the right direction towards building simple components that can be easily maintained and extended.
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#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 lot of experience, not necessarily someone who knows the ins and outs of technology X.
Can anyone shed some light on this? It just seems bizarre to me that if you want to be a senior developer you'd need to either stick with the same technologies you used before..
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#7"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 I don't think I'd want to work for this guy. Keeping up is one thing. What makes a mature dev is language/tech agnostic.
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#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 values language/framework knowledge above expertise. Speaking as a backend dev I find as you move up in seniority it becomes impossible to keep up with the latest technologies. Learning management skills, being move involved in architecting and business development all take time. You may end up doing code reviews, project management and cleaning up the 'legacy' (read broken) parts of the system. Does that make you less valuable?
To a company that insists on every part of their project being built in the latest cool language/framework (and yes, I still class NodeJS as this) then yes. To a pragmatic company, which may choose NodeJS if it's the best fit, or Rails, or PHP, or Java - no.
We're back at the skills vs language debate, one which I thought has been done to death.
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#9This is a debate I am having right now. Should I go the sysadmin route (hadoop clusters, etc), become a data scientist, or choose to get into cybersecurity. I have been leaning against choosing the web development career path
Re: Web Development as a career – the realities
#10I fear there is a new generation of developers who have jumped into programming using nodejs as their core language and fit this description you mention "On more occasions than I could count, the candidate for this type of role would have some cool technologies listed on their resume and completed an adequate coding test which is part of our hiring procedure.". If you don't know algorithmic complexity, how to run all sorts of tests, or have any clue about security measures but can set up a nodejs express webserver in 5 mins you are a script kiddie at best. Unfortunately these type of developers are now getting jobs because its the new web development buzzword