It was exciting thirty, twenty-five, even twenty years ago. I loved it.
But the pay/perks situation is dependent on putting up with a lot of corporate BS; if you're a solo developer, or the only developer in a small team, web stuff is hard, the task shrinks over time as things commoditise and you become more dependent on hosted offerings, and pays relatively poorly. I am tired and seeking a direction change before it is too late.
Literally the only topic on which I agree with Elon Musk is that more developers need to be persuaded to do something more interesting than getting dragged into web dev BS. And I wish I'd paid a lot, lot more attention in maths lessons away on topics that didn't have to do with logic.
(It is, nevertheless, amusing that it is web dev BS where Musk is getting his posterior handed to him)
I currently have the short-term luxury to rethink.
I am steering myself away from web dev tools (I'm a Laravel/PHP/Rails/Node.js/Vue/React/GraphQL/DB/server/Perl/HTML/CSS/front-end/back-end/every-bloody-end guy, jack-of-all-trades, master-of-some).
I've been doing it too long and I'm a solo/design agency worker now. I've built some big stuff (and some early semi-famous stuff) and I've also ended up doing the crappy-little-WP-site shuffle.
I am aiming specifically towards tools that reach out a little further.
Basically I am finally, after all these years, properly learning Python, which I have never once actually needed. Because it reaches further than the programming languages on that list. Into desktop app development. Into scientific computing. Into embedded. More towards 3D printing, GIS etc.
And it still works for all the web things, so I can bridge.
And perhaps most importantly, more towards teaching and education, so I can actually be some use before I die.
Comments
It was exciting thirty, twenty-five, even twenty years ago. I loved it.
But the pay/perks situation is dependent on putting up with a lot of corporate BS; if you're a solo developer, or the only developer in a small team, web stuff is hard, the task shrinks over time as things commoditise and you become more dependent on hosted offerings, and pays relatively poorly. I am tired and seeking a direction change before it is too late.
Literally the only topic on which I agree with Elon Musk is that more developers need to be persuaded to do something more interesting than getting dragged into web dev BS. And I wish I'd paid a lot, lot more attention in maths lessons away on topics that didn't have to do with logic.
(It is, nevertheless, amusing that it is web dev BS where Musk is getting his posterior handed to him)
I’m with you. I’d love to work in not web dev, but I don’t even know how to do that.
Feels like everything is server programming.
I currently have the short-term luxury to rethink.
I am steering myself away from web dev tools (I'm a Laravel/PHP/Rails/Node.js/Vue/React/GraphQL/DB/server/Perl/HTML/CSS/front-end/back-end/every-bloody-end guy, jack-of-all-trades, master-of-some).
I've been doing it too long and I'm a solo/design agency worker now. I've built some big stuff (and some early semi-famous stuff) and I've also ended up doing the crappy-little-WP-site shuffle.
I am aiming specifically towards tools that reach out a little further.
Basically I am finally, after all these years, properly learning Python, which I have never once actually needed. Because it reaches further than the programming languages on that list. Into desktop app development. Into scientific computing. Into embedded. More towards 3D printing, GIS etc.
And it still works for all the web things, so I can bridge.
And perhaps most importantly, more towards teaching and education, so I can actually be some use before I die.
Learning different areas of programming is all well and good.
I started in game mechanics programming and graphics programming when I was a kid.
But that isn’t the same as knowing how to get a job in those fields.