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> I'm also really not interested in how things work for "typical CRUD apps" You mean you're not interested in what a huge part of the industry is doing? Well t

by smokeyj 10y ago

> I'm also really not interested in how things work for "typical CRUD apps" You mean you're not interested in what a huge part of the industry is doing? Well then that explains why you don't see the benefit. There's tons of work creating user interfaces, transform some business logic and shove it back in a DB. No one said it was going to be a life-fulfilling experience. It's just work. Now many of these shops want a native ui, mobile ui, responsive design and a back-end developer all in one. Many times they hire for specific frameworks so that you're ready to be productive day 1. If I were staffing up a team to do a CRUD app, or even more complex, I'd staff up with JS developers.

noir_lord 10y ago
I like doing CRUD apps, beyond the trivial you run into a terrific amount of business logic and thats an opportunity to really have an impact, one of my proudest moments as a programmer was taking a process that was largely manual and took 3 staff 2 days and making it something the boss could do in half an hour on a Friday afternoon by redefining the underlying assumptions about how their business worked - it's amazing how many businesses do <involved complex manual process> because that's how we've always done <involved complex manual process>. It's 2017, We've had desktop computers for 35 years and most of the people I know working in various industries still manage a huge chunk of their work in email and excel because it's hard for their management to understand the benefits of automation or why they'd make an investment in the longer term with good software, I know of one company thats in the FTSE250 that manages it's entire pallet and tray inventory by using excel spreadsheets on a shared drive and sending people from the office to sites to look whats there (they order 100K+ Trays at a time).
- nine_k 10y ago
  "Where Excel spreadsheets are used to run a business, there is an opportunity to sell software" (quote from memory).
  - klodolph 10y ago
    Yeah, but Excel can be pretty cheap compared to custom software.
    - Roboprog 10y ago
      Look for cases where the cost of errors is high, then pitch the reliability of a managed workflow in the software. Otherwise, yeah, trivial stuff probably is done best with spreadsheets, wikis and ad-hoc emails.
      - noir_lord 10y ago
        Absolutely this. Keeping track of some office supplies ordering, excel is fine. Keeping track of 100K pallets where delays because they got 'lost' knock on right down the supply chain not so much.
klodolph 10y ago
> You mean you're not interested in what a huge part of the industry is doing? Well then that explains why you don't see the benefit. Yes, you chopped off the important half of the sentence, and responded as if I hadn't written it. I said that I wasn't interesting because CRUD apps are already so easy to write in many different frameworks. Let's assume that what you're saying is true—that most shops want all of those skills rolled into one person. The people I've met that are good at both front-end and back-end development are comfortable in multiple languages to begin with. The developers who only know JavaScript and are not comfortable in other languages are not good full stack developers. But I don't believe that this is true to begin with, most places I've seen or the places where my friends work have people who focus on front-end and people who focus on back-end. There's just too much of a crazy front-end landscape to expect magic from someone who doesn't live in that world, and back-end is its own world.
- smokeyj 10y ago
  > Yes, you chopped off the important half of the sentence It doesn't matter if CRUD apps are easy to write, the point is there's market demand. And for some reason you write them off as trivial, but I've seen some business logic/requirements that'll make your head spin. > The people I've met that are good at both front-end and back-end development are comfortable in multiple languages to begin with. This type of position is becoming way more common. But I imagine many of them would prefer to work with one language anyways (I do). It keeps things simple. One language to be an expert on, that can be interviewed for, one testing library, one debugger, one set of coding standards. It's kind of a no brainer. I'd argue that almost any expert front-end dev can be a decent back-end developer.

by smokeyj 10y ago

noir_lord 10y ago

I like doing CRUD apps, beyond the trivial you run into a terrific amount of business logic and thats an opportunity to really have an impact, one of my proudest moments as a programmer was taking a process that was largely manual and took 3 staff 2 days and making it something the boss could do in half an hour on a Friday afternoon by redefining the underlying assumptions about how their business worked - it's amazing how many businesses do <involved complex manual process> because that's how we've always done <involved complex manual process>. It's 2017, We've had desktop computers for 35 years and most of the people I know working in various industries still manage a huge chunk of their work in email and excel because it's hard for their management to understand the benefits of automation or why they'd make an investment in the longer term with good software, I know of one company thats in the FTSE250 that manages it's entire pallet and tray inventory by using excel spreadsheets on a shared drive and sending people from the office to sites to look whats there (they order 100K+ Trays at a time).

nine_k 10y ago
"Where Excel spreadsheets are used to run a business, there is an opportunity to sell software" (quote from memory).
- klodolph 10y ago
  Yeah, but Excel can be pretty cheap compared to custom software.
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    Look for cases where the cost of errors is high, then pitch the reliability of a managed workflow in the software. Otherwise, yeah, trivial stuff probably is done best with spreadsheets, wikis and ad-hoc emails.
    - noir_lord 10y ago
      Absolutely this. Keeping track of some office supplies ordering, excel is fine. Keeping track of 100K pallets where delays because they got 'lost' knock on right down the supply chain not so much.

klodolph 10y ago

> You mean you're not interested in what a huge part of the industry is doing? Well then that explains why you don't see the benefit. Yes, you chopped off the important half of the sentence, and responded as if I hadn't written it. I said that I wasn't interesting because CRUD apps are already so easy to write in many different frameworks. Let's assume that what you're saying is true—that most shops want all of those skills rolled into one person. The people I've met that are good at both front-end and back-end development are comfortable in multiple languages to begin with. The developers who only know JavaScript and are not comfortable in other languages are not good full stack developers. But I don't believe that this is true to begin with, most places I've seen or the places where my friends work have people who focus on front-end and people who focus on back-end. There's just too much of a crazy front-end landscape to expect magic from someone who doesn't live in that world, and back-end is its own world.

smokeyj 10y ago
> Yes, you chopped off the important half of the sentence It doesn't matter if CRUD apps are easy to write, the point is there's market demand. And for some reason you write them off as trivial, but I've seen some business logic/requirements that'll make your head spin. > The people I've met that are good at both front-end and back-end development are comfortable in multiple languages to begin with. This type of position is becoming way more common. But I imagine many of them would prefer to work with one language anyways (I do). It keeps things simple. One language to be an expert on, that can be interviewed for, one testing library, one debugger, one set of coding standards. It's kind of a no brainer. I'd argue that almost any expert front-end dev can be a decent back-end developer.