Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#221

Post by mscasts » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

sureaboutthis wrote: post #45

mscasts wrote: post #34

I am a web developer and I get contacted a few times a week on LinkedIn about switching jobs. I assure you, if you are a web developer you will not go job less no matter where you live unless you're doing something very wrong.

I'm an electronic engineer turned software engineer and have been doing this for decades. I am in the Midwest USA, a large city but not a high tech one. I used to be contacted by headhunters at least once a week. Nowadays, I hear from Indeed and LinkedIn that often. I have been to their offices for interviews and assured they would find me a job quick. While I have risen through the ranks over the years to project ma…

Ok yeah, I guess that is probably a common story. I have though and I would assume that is also common :)

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#222

Post by IOT_Apprentice » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:08 AM UTC

dublin wrote: post #208

tracker1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to wr…

Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipeli…

Because for some, tools like awk, sed and perhaps grep are unknown skills.

The focus is on pumping out Java or C++ folks who never were given assignments using said tools and therefore never knew or learned them. Python is the new Perl, not sure what the new awk is.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#223

Post by catwind7 » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:12 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #161

catwind7 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that he's taking issue with this argument that I'm not quite sure was made: "The market is flooded with people who cannot code, therefore it's easy to find a job as a junior engineer" The market could in fact be flooded with people who cannot code (I don't know for sure). Assuming that's true, that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to get a job as a junior dev (speaking from someone on the interviewing s…

On the market being flooded, I think it varies greatly depending on where you are and whom you are with. With my current job I am part of a competent team of smart people but on my last job it seems that IQ was in short supply, for candidates, vendors, and even our "partners". Even though the last job ended months ago, I'm still trying to unconvince myself that everyone in this world is stupid and incompetent, becaus…

Yeah totally. I have a friend who mostly works with the IT in big banks and pretty recently he told me he had to explain what "Git" was to a more senior eng. That was shocking to me but then again maybe I'm too steeped in webdev.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#224

Post by koudos » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:20 AM UTC

dublin wrote: post #208

tracker1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to wr…

Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipeli…

Unfortunately, the reason they probably chose their own solution is that it was probably the easiest way to get it into production in a repeatable way in their mind with the least risk they would mess it up.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#225

Post by koudos » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #100

milosdog2 wrote: post #98

People say that web dev (the javascript/react/python/c#/java) fullstack kind is boring and mundane. But what else do people actually do? Sure, there's ML and embedded work but aren't most engineers doing CRUD work anyway?

Is ML even a programming job? I see it more like data science, 10% programming 90% math. Edit: 3% programming, 30% math, 67% scrubbing data. Thanks for the correction shortoncash. :)

I think there's a general misuse of terms like AI, Machine Learning, Data science and Data engineer. ML is the new "Big Data"

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#226

Post by nikdaheratik » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 12:58 AM UTC

It really depends on your market and what you've learned. There are plenty of jobs that involve making things to put out on the web, which is what "web development" is. But they are all semi-specialised and very few people can make a living with just basic HTML/CSS/JS web development skills.

The bread and butter of alot of "Web Developers" is Wordpress. If you learn that inside and out, you can likely find a job somewhere in a decent market. There are other CMS you can learn instead, but once you pick up one, then the others shouldn't be that difficult.

Another path is to pick up a ton of client side javascript skills (ideally combining bootstrap with frameworks like Angular, Vue, etc) and become a "front end" developer. This is relatively easy to break into, but it's harder to muddle your way through as you have to know a wider variety of skills. If you have the aptitude it can pay very well, though.

Probably the hardest to break into, but maybe the most stable, is to learn about databases and how the server works, and then go into server-side programming using PHP, Java, or javascript using node.js. I think this would involve some serious time commitment, and may be something you pick up after you get your foot in the door.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#227

Post by gremlinsinc » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 1:05 AM UTC

My advice, as a full-stack dev (laravel on backend, vue(mostly) on frontend) -- learn and become a javascript master. Learn react and vue. Learn everything there is to know about es6+. Learn to use react native and/or nativescript to build mobile apps as well.

There are a lot of php/laravel jobs still, but JS seems to pay more, and it's everywhere - the # of jobs out there for frontend or full-stack js devs is crazy. Plus with JS you can do backend and frontend.

One thing you might do to get started is find a mentor, or partner with someone and just start building stuff. Tutorials are shit (except when you need them to solve a problem). You can't just learn to code following a book or guide or video. You've got to get your hands dirty and 'tinker' with things. When you try to do something and can't figure out how, then you'll go and watch tutorials or read stackoverflow threads.

Everytime you break through these 'walls', is when you level up your skills and reach new heights as a developer. I've been doing laravel since 2013, and Vue since 2016 and I'm still learning every day.

Every time I see older code I wrote even 3 or 4 months earlier, I cringe at how ugly it is and could be improved with what I now know. You have to love learning though to be a good dev, because you'll be learning/googling your way out of problems for the rest of your life or until you build an app that brings in residual income and lets you retire.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#228

Post by jtchang » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 1:07 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #210

monsieurbanana wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the question? I like to ask them to explain either the concept of closures in javascript, or how `this` works. I don't even need them to know the word closure, knowing why you can't reference a variable written inside another function, the difference between var and let, or what does bind/apply do.

What are the values that equate to false in an if statement? false, null, undefined, NaN, "" (empty string), 0 Bonus: An object with a toString() method that returns one of the above won't evaluate directly, but will roughly equal (foo == false). sometimes I'll ask for a function that returns input as a whole number or null, if it's a string, attempt to parse base 10, return null if invalid, return null if the input…

Isn't this basically atoi? Which has a lot of edge cases.

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#229

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 1:51 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #215

dev_19 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you can actually be a productive employee I literally know 100 companies that will hire you today. As a self-taught engineer you have to convince them of that, which mostly means a solid portfolio, but there is insane demand. And if you get even one year of experience you won’t believe how many opportunities open up. This just isn’t true. The industry has become insanely competitive for anyone but the top level s…

> This just isn’t true. Yes it is (but you need to be overall personable and have good communication skills). After 1 year at a small dev shop I started with 0 years of experience, I got an offer at a big company you've heard of (not FAANG but public) for double. I didn't take it because I got bad vibes from the management but it was great to know I could. I say this not to brag that I'm brilliant because I am decide…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is web development still a viable career choice?

#230

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

jtchang wrote: post #228

tracker1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the values that equate to false in an if statement? false, null, undefined, NaN, "" (empty string), 0 Bonus: An object with a toString() method that returns one of the above won't evaluate directly, but will roughly equal (foo == false). sometimes I'll ask for a function that returns input as a whole number or null, if it's a string, attempt to parse base 10, return null if invalid, return null if the input…

Isn't this basically atoi? Which has a lot of edge cases.

pretty much... the main one I tend to ask is the 6 falsy values, clarified as needed. The responses tend to be a good overall indicator of how well the person knows JS.