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Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

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Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#11

Post by thrower123 »

danielovichdk wrote: post #5

Boring, No. Painful, Yes. I have programmed to the Web in 20 years and it has become worse over the years. I believe, that if you make an effort and stay vanilla you will enjoy the work many fold. I love the Web but it's not the Web it was yesterday. Unfortuneatly imho

Exactly, I wouldn't call it boring. Things break in interesting new ways all the time, and you have to constantly be learning, because the pace of change is so breakneck.

It's frustrating as all hell though. Debuggers and tooling are in a pretty sad state in comparison to what I'm used to developing server-side and desktop applications, and the iteration loop for making simple changes can be pretty bad, depending on how involved your JS compilation and build pipeline is.

Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#14

Post by BossingAround »

orblivion wrote: post #10
Raidion wrote: post #6

This is such a click bait headline I don't even want to comment. Web Development is boring if you think it's boring. A lot of people don't. If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to solve different problems in different ways. If you don't think it's boring, hey that's awesome, you keep on making cool stuff. If you're bored, it's probably time to start job hunting.

> If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to solve different problems in different ways. Dumb, overly broad question, but I gotta ask at some point - does anyone have suggestions for figuring out what industries are out there, what they're like, where one may want to try next, how one might break into them? Career navigation isn't my strong suit, as you can probably guess.

That's actually a really good question. The thing is, this differs wildly on where you are (or where you want to be, geographically wise). In some cities, you might see entirely different positions just because there are different companies with different needs (e.g. security analysts near big bank headquarters). I too would like a general list of popular programming-related positions though.

Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#15

Post by balabaster »

In my experience, working in startups is anything but boring. You have to wear all hats and solve all problems. You have to be ready to think on your feet. You've gotta be able to think fast and act and be able to deal with the consequences of your actions on the fly. This is start up life. It's exciting, but it's stressful. Some might call it a baptism of fire.

Working in startups - especially if they have funding, is definitely not what I'd call boring.

If you're thinking about a startup, you need to be comfortable doing full stack dev, testing, infrastructure, operations, debugging in production, debugging on your local dev, databases both querying and architecture, unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, scalability and being able to be ripped out of whatever it is you're doing that needed to be finished yesterday to debug the server that just went down taking out your primary income stream; and then when it's done and you've high fived a couple of people, you need to be able to sit right back down and get the shit out of the door you got ripped away from to do that.

This is startup life. If you don't like the heat, you'd definitely better stay out of the kitchen.

If you're working in a startup and you're finding it boring, then chances are this startup isn't going anywhere. Time to get your CV out.

Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#17

Post by rat9988 »

Raidion wrote: post #6

This is such a click bait headline I don't even want to comment. Web Development is boring if you think it's boring. A lot of people don't. If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to solve different problems in different ways. If you don't think it's boring, hey that's awesome, you keep on making cool stuff. If you're bored, it's probably time to start job hunting.

> If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to solve different problems in different ways.

My experience is a bit more mitigated here as a junior dev. No one wants to recruit a software dev who has only webdev experience somewhere else.

Unless I have some serious open source contributions to prove myself I guess, but my point is it's not as straightforward or easy as I felt it is implied.

Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#18

Post by eropple »

thrower123 wrote: post #11
danielovichdk wrote: post #5

Boring, No. Painful, Yes. I have programmed to the Web in 20 years and it has become worse over the years. I believe, that if you make an effort and stay vanilla you will enjoy the work many fold. I love the Web but it's not the Web it was yesterday. Unfortuneatly imho

Exactly, I wouldn't call it boring. Things break in interesting new ways all the time, and you have to constantly be learning, because the pace of change is so breakneck. It's frustrating as all hell though. Debuggers and tooling are in a pretty sad state in comparison to what I'm used to developing server-side and desktop applications, and the iteration loop for making simple changes can be pretty bad, depending on…

I feel like the pace of change has slowed a lot over the last few years, to be honest, and I wouldn't use that argument as a reason to not get into web development today.

I kind of divide web development into three eras: pre-jQuery, jQuery, and post-jQuery. There was a lot of thrash in the pre-jQuery-to-jQuery era; remember MooTools? my first job was using that in 2010, that sure was a time to be doing that kind of thing. I missed most of the jQuery era because I was busy building the systems that the jQuery folks talked to, so I can't speak too much about that, but it seemed relatively stable, if not static, for a long time. And just as I was getting back into web development there was also a lot of thrash in the jQuery-to-post-jQuery era; Angular 1 or Angular 2 while wearing your regulation blue tie or React cool-kids wearing sunglasses at night and you've got the Ember guys over here quietly doing things and I am contractually obligated to mention Vue or I will have between two and thirty responses saying that I forgot about Vue, it's the Ansible of the frontend world.

But at this point it seems...mostly stable? The browsers are mostly predictable and mostly cover everything the 99% case cares about, everybody's browser engine is fast enough even if it isn't fast, and the various ecosystems out there have off-the-shelf solutions for most things and the crowd of Github starrers have given the rest of us decent signals as to what we should give a real look at. I feel like debuggers have gotten a lot better, though admittedly not at the level of something like IntelliJ; I have VSCode set up to breakpoint TypeScript (aside: a lot of what made frontend/JS development suck a lot less was TypeScript winning the metaphorical war) in Firefox and the experience is pretty clean.

Build pipelines can still be bad. Kind of a "doctor, it hurts when I do this" problem, though. Happy-path pipelines seem pretty speedy, although I do most of my development on a thoroughly un-heat-throttled Linux desktop rather than the metric standard Macbook Pro.

Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#19

Post by eropple »

balabaster wrote: post #15

In my experience, working in startups is anything but boring. You have to wear all hats and solve all problems. You have to be ready to think on your feet. You've gotta be able to think fast and act and be able to deal with the consequences of your actions on the fly. This is start up life. It's exciting, but it's stressful. Some might call it a baptism of fire. Working in startups - especially if they have funding,…

> If you're thinking about a startup, you need to be comfortable doing ...

This list is good advice for anyone, not just startup employees. It's also really optimistic as pertains to startups, and comes off as some myth-making stuff. (Startups don't deserve myth-making and they definitely aren't glamorous. If it isn't your baby, then it's a job. Woe betide you if you don't keep that in mind.)

I agree that anybody should be capable of those things--though to be honest I say that about wherever you're working, "specialization is for insects" is one of the only Heinlein quotes teenage-me liked that I think still fits--but the reality is that the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of developers at startups don't have most of those skillsets when they walk in the door.

I consulted for quite a while and most of my clients were startups. In my experience, most startups before or at the "elbow curve" of growth have zero to "a few" senior engineers (the group of whom may include the technical co-founder/co-founders) with a broad skillset, a lot of juniors (the group of whom may include the technical co-founder/co-founders, they just don't know it yet) who have fallen for an okeydoke of an under-market salary and toilet-paper options, and zero to one principal engineer (the group of whom may include one of the technical co-founders) who is paid something within smoke-signal distance of market rate and is expected to perform miracles on a daily basis.

You will, to be clear, learn a lot of the stuff in that list if you're at a small, growing startup; you'll have to. Whether you do it right, or whether you do it right enough to do it at your next job...good question. I really wouldn't expect most developers to party on in with even a majority of those things already nailed down, though.

If they did, most startups couldn't afford them.

Re: Is it boring working in Web Development startups?

#20

Post by indigochill »

orblivion wrote: post #10
Raidion wrote: post #6

This is such a click bait headline I don't even want to comment. Web Development is boring if you think it's boring. A lot of people don't. If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to solve different problems in different ways. If you don't think it's boring, hey that's awesome, you keep on making cool stuff. If you're bored, it's probably time to start job hunting.

> If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to solve different problems in different ways. Dumb, overly broad question, but I gotta ask at some point - does anyone have suggestions for figuring out what industries are out there, what they're like, where one may want to try next, how one might break into them? Career navigation isn't my strong suit, as you can probably guess.

As a general rule of thumb (not that I'm great at this), physical networking might be the most tried and true. Look at whatever local conferences there are, go there, ask people what they do and what challenges they face. Their challenges could be your opportunities if you can find a way to leverage your strengths to solve them in a way that they can afford/use.

At least, that's one idea.

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