jorblume's comments

Oh totally, it's a completely different world. I mean look at Stackoverflow. Literally one google search can solve even the more complex problems a programmer might encounter. Like you said, github, meetups, skype...just reading through source code on github helps me immensely.

I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling.

At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times I ask myself...why is this stupid and what am I going to break?

It definitely has its ups and downs. I think the most valuable lesson has been self reliance. No one is fixing this, it's on me. No one is going to refactor this, except for me.

edit: spelling :(

It's a gut check for motivation. How badly do you want to be there? Are you willing to give almost everything for the firm?

Hazing might be a part of it but I see it more like boot camp than anything else. Weed out those who don't have the fortitude and drive. They don't want employees who value family time over the company, for example. Forcing people to work insane hours will self select for the "right stuff".

It's not about productivity, it's about cultivating a specific culture.

Go and Java are two entirely different languages so I'm not sure what that comparison was about.

Furthermore, the age of the tool has nothing to do with the fact that there are literally 10 tools that do almost the same thing. But are syntactically and dependency different. It's a huge pain when someone new is hired or you leave for somewhere else. Too many cooks in the kitchen type of thing.

The worst part about web dev is the amount of time spent investigating every little new tool that comes out. It could be useful, it could not, how do you know unless you investigate it yourself? You could easily spend 20+ hours a week just evaluating tools. And not only that, but some of the most adopted tool aren't performant. Grunt sucks. It really does. Angular is needlessly confusing and overly complex for what it actually does. It also doesn't scale and you need to get super hacky with it to perform properly. You spend more time trying to learn new tools than you do actually coding, then find out the tools aren't even well thought out.

Then what happens when you leave your position and someone comes in a year later? Oooh, that sass preprocessor doesn't work? What's an angular, some kind of measuring tool? The entire system has a "doesn't matter I'll be at the next startup in 2 years" kind of feel to it.

I should really move into Java or C....

It's just another move from the corporate elite to break down the ability of democracies to fight against them. They have corrupted the US system and aim to do the same everywhere else.