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.
> 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.
Hiya! Author here. I can't comment on why you felt this was clickbaity. The intention was to give a third-person perspective of the life of an engineer as a webdev at a startup, emphasis on _startup_.
The post is largely targeted at beginners. I think giving this perspective to fresh grads can help them take a decision to atleast clear up the dilemma when they have to choose to work at a startup/corporate during internships or right after college.
The reason I wrote it was because during my four years at college, we had this perception that webdev was boring and nobody used to opt to interview for companies which were into it. And the joke was, "All you do is change the colors every 6 months". I had the chance to intern at a SaaS startup and then worked there for more than 2 years and then figured students back at college needs to know more about this experience.
For many developers, UIs are often the most rewarding part of code to work on, the impact of making a change is immediate and obvious, and hey, pretty stuff is fun to make!
That said, the learning curve before HTML/CSS is "pain free" to develop with is huge. Especially compared to mobile frameworks, a native UI widget is easier to style and place on the screen. Also it'll probably keep rendering properly for the foreseeable future. (Or write a Windows app and it'll keep working until the end of time! :)
I've struggled a bit when I have to switch over to writing back end code for my startup. Some of it is mentally rewarding, writing a scheduling system for example, but other parts are just tedious, especially the CRUD stuff.
Of course worst of all was writing the scripts for and documenting how to do deployments. People who enjoy DevOps are kinda weird. ;)
As an aside, awhile back I threw together a simple WinForms app to do some trivial CRUD work in my DB. I have full Auth + Data Binding + UI working in ~2 hours. I hadn't used C# or Winforms in a few years. Porting that same UI over to the web took way too long. Getting the tooling up and running was a day! I hit a bug involving a release version of some NPM package that took hours to debug and then the framework I installed was using the globally installed version of Typescript instead of its own local version which took while to figure out and, well, a few more things like that. :/
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.
> 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.
Right on! This freedom to wear many hats is what makes working at startups such a lively place. Startup is chaos and finding ways to contribute to the overall business eliminating the chaos is what makes your worth.
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.
The article sets up the idea that 80-90% of a project gets done well, but the rest gets ignored because it is boring. However, the article does not describe what the boring parts are, or how to integrate them in scheduling to dull the pain.
I did like the idea of taking a break before product launch. The push to make a deadline carried forward into a release brings charged emotions that won't match the new users'.
This article seems to be saying that getting the data infrastructure built (i.e. backend) is the exciting part, but when it's time to build the front end it becomes boring.
Is that because it's boring, or is it because people think front end is easy/straightforward and then realize it's not? I'd argue that the front end is a much more difficult task than the backend in the beginning of a startup.
There is more to web development than putting in style properties. For example I deem TypeScript one of the nicest language I've ever worked it, and React (Native; especially after they introduced hooks), and WASM fascinating technologies.
Raidion|6 years ago
If you're bored, it's probably time to start job hunting.
orblivion|6 years ago
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.
rat9988|6 years ago
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.
raviojha|6 years ago
The post is largely targeted at beginners. I think giving this perspective to fresh grads can help them take a decision to atleast clear up the dilemma when they have to choose to work at a startup/corporate during internships or right after college.
The reason I wrote it was because during my four years at college, we had this perception that webdev was boring and nobody used to opt to interview for companies which were into it. And the joke was, "All you do is change the colors every 6 months". I had the chance to intern at a SaaS startup and then worked there for more than 2 years and then figured students back at college needs to know more about this experience.
rossenberg79|6 years ago
[deleted]
com2kid|6 years ago
That said, the learning curve before HTML/CSS is "pain free" to develop with is huge. Especially compared to mobile frameworks, a native UI widget is easier to style and place on the screen. Also it'll probably keep rendering properly for the foreseeable future. (Or write a Windows app and it'll keep working until the end of time! :)
I've struggled a bit when I have to switch over to writing back end code for my startup. Some of it is mentally rewarding, writing a scheduling system for example, but other parts are just tedious, especially the CRUD stuff.
Of course worst of all was writing the scripts for and documenting how to do deployments. People who enjoy DevOps are kinda weird. ;)
As an aside, awhile back I threw together a simple WinForms app to do some trivial CRUD work in my DB. I have full Auth + Data Binding + UI working in ~2 hours. I hadn't used C# or Winforms in a few years. Porting that same UI over to the web took way too long. Getting the tooling up and running was a day! I hit a bug involving a release version of some NPM package that took hours to debug and then the framework I installed was using the globally installed version of Typescript instead of its own local version which took while to figure out and, well, a few more things like that. :/
balabaster|6 years ago
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.
eropple|6 years ago
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.
raviojha|6 years ago
danielovichdk|6 years ago
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
thrower123|6 years ago
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.
techbio|6 years ago
I did like the idea of taking a break before product launch. The push to make a deadline carried forward into a release brings charged emotions that won't match the new users'.
travisl12|6 years ago
Is that because it's boring, or is it because people think front end is easy/straightforward and then realize it's not? I'd argue that the front end is a much more difficult task than the backend in the beginning of a startup.
imesh|6 years ago
nateferrero|6 years ago
zenojevski|6 years ago
lukifer|6 years ago
jgwil2|6 years ago
genmon|6 years ago
asark|6 years ago
TomMarius|6 years ago
There is more to web development than putting in style properties. For example I deem TypeScript one of the nicest language I've ever worked it, and React (Native; especially after they introduced hooks), and WASM fascinating technologies.