6 ms·

> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because

by SCdF 8y ago

> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because making web sites is easy. Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. (Whether that complexity is 'justified' is an entirely different discussion that, while no doubt interesting, has nothing to do with this person's post)

axlee 8y ago
Whoever says web is "easy" never had to build or maintain a large web application. The ecosystem is incredibly deep and constantly evolving, to the point where best practices change every six months.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  Not to mention; web developers are constantly having to context switch between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Old school days they also had a backend language like PHP or Perl. Many still do. Then there was/is SQL. By my count, that's at least five different languages to know all at once.
  - shawn 8y ago
    “Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”
    - pault 8y ago
      I don't understand your analogy. What is walking to the store without juggling any plates in web development? I'm not aware of any stack that allows you to write styles, markup, business logic, and database queries in a single language.
      - Zelphyr 8y ago
        I don't understand the analogy either but I do know that when I'm doing iOS development it's almost always all in Swift. Sometimes some C or Objective-C or even C++ smattered in but that actually kinda proves my point because when I have to deal with one of those languages in a Swift project I slow down.
      - shawn 8y ago
        Arc does, fwiw. And that’s an important design goal. There is a lot of progress left to be made in this space.
      - ken 8y ago
        I'm doing that today with Clojure/EDN: Garden, Reagent, Clojure/ClojureScript, HoneySQL. (You might think it cheating somewhat because HoneySQL is just a thin syntactic wrapper on SQL, but then again, if I weren't cheap/poor, I could use Datomic, where it really is the same language.)
      - doublecouponday 8y ago
        In C#, you can almost do everything in a single language (linq to sql, model binding). You still need extensible application markup language (XAML) for the view.
    - expertentipp 8y ago
      Isn’t using Java, PyTorch, Elasticsearch, and neural networks for a TODO iOS app the same?
      - Zelphyr 8y ago
        Why would you use any of those technologies to build a TODO app?
        expertentipp 8y ago
        My point is that overengineering and CV- or grant- driven development is not exclusive to the web.
        spiritcat 8y ago
        Well instead of you telling TODO app what you have to do, TODO app tells you what you have to do, and that frees you up to think about doing it. Or it just does it for you and you go to beach.
      - hdkmraf 8y ago
        This made me burst in laughter. I am indeed using Java and Elasticsearch, and no PyTorch, but Spark for an app I am working on. Way more complex than it should be.
    - danso 8y ago
      Non-trivial websites are more complicated than walking to the store.
  - amalcon 8y ago
    It's a little weird to count a markup language, a presentation language, and a query language on the same axis as Turing-complete programming languages. If we go by that metric, the average sysadmin knows dozens of languages all at once. Yet sysadmin work is also often looked down on for some reason. I don't have a good explanation for either of those phenomena, but I think language-counting isn't a good way to combat them.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - oneplane 8y ago
      I think those markup and styling languages and even SQL have all been used in turing-completeness examples. Everything is bad, nothing is easy, and we might as well stop using the internet. We're all going really fast, but nobody knows where ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - Zelphyr 8y ago
      I've done sysadmin work as well and the context switching didn't feel as prohibitive. Generally I was using something like Perl, Python, Bash, etc... but rarely switching between more than one in any given day. With web development, I have to know HTML, CSS, and JS at least. I probably really need to know SQL. And I switch between those four (at least) every day, many times a day.
  - flukus 8y ago
    Before "full stack" was invented that used to be spread out across 2 or more jobs, you'd have frontend people, backend people, maybe database people, maybe even designers in addition to the front end people. The context switching existed but not at the same frequency.
expertentipp 8y ago
I’m there and cannot stand it. In my company, for the native apps each problem has it’s own dedicated team. Including ML team which doesn’t have any results yet. I’m the only „cloud” person, everyone assumes that anyting „web” takes 0 time and effort to complete. I truly hate these people. BTW it’s Germany - when they hear „internet” their brains turn into a pile of rotten cabbage.
nerdponx 8y ago
This is nuts. The reason I avoid web dev is that it's complicated and hectic.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
narag 8y ago
Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. The reason is how a lot of companies do web: sloppyly and pay peanuts.
BurningFrog 8y ago
The problem is that you're both right. Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do. Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”. And it is equally legitimately "web development"...
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon).
  - amelius 8y ago
    If rockets were built like software ... (insert joke)
  - warty 8y ago
    400k - wow that puts things to scale. This sort of comparison really should have been in my schooling textbooks.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    Well, I did say they were smaller projects :) But you're of course right that I exaggerated a bit for effect. I do that sometimes. My point still stands if you slice a few orders of magnitude off my hyperbole.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      I don't disagree that Google and Facebook do enormous amounts of difficult engineering (I recently saw a USAF slide which compared Google's R&D spending on software to the entire defence industry's). But the Apollo program and the Manhattan project were something else. Arguably they represent the historical highwater marks in terms of megaprojects which had effectively unlimited resources in the face of wide-open, unsolved problems.
themagician 8y ago
The inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff. Tech is the new Wall Street in a lot of ways. But instead of being honest about where the paycheck comes from we gloss it up so it’s less morally reprehensible. I actually have more respect for people on Wall Street these days. At least they are honest with themselves about the game. I think I have more respect for Jordan Belfort and Lou Pai then the exec teams af Facebook and Uber.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  >The inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff. I see this mindset in Seattle very often. A lot of my friends have recently been quitting their jobs to do something other than tech because of the overly inflated egos and the need for software engineers to constantly "do something new" instead of just maintaining & fix what they already have.
  - zBard 8y ago
    Or they get tired/can't keep up with having to continuously learn and adapt, which cognitive dissonance defensively turns into disdain for 'something new'.
- bokonon12 8y ago
  As a web developer I've even come across other web devs who are chasing "hard problems" and claim CRUD apps are easy and boring. Yet many of them still manage to write nearly-unmaintainable and rigid APIs etc. They haven't even figured out the "basics" but want to go straight for the "hard problems".
userbinator 8y ago
As someone at the "other extreme" end from web developers, and having briefly done some "real web dev" myself, I can easily see why it's so loathed. There are immense amounts of churn. The continuing "appification" and bloating of websites with user and privacy-hostile crap. Reinventing ever-more-complex solutions to non-existent problems (remember the left-pad debacle?) Dogmatic cargo-cult thinking. Sadly, it's rare that a website "redesign" is an actual improvement instead of pure fashion-chasing. (Whether that complexity is 'justified' is an entirely different discussion that, while no doubt interesting, has nothing to do with this person's post) IMHO that has everything to do with it. It's hard to have any other opinion of web developers when you constantly see the large amounts of unnecessary complexity they foist upon everyone else. As I said, I worked in that space briefly, with others who had severe "framework envy", and largely see this complexity as being self-inflicted --- in some ways it was like Enterprise Java (another thing I did for a similarly brief time), except with much more churn. On more than one occasion I've had to clean up the mess they made by rewriting large web apps with simpler means, and the result was better by every metric (speed, memory, lines of code, etc.) except perhaps fashionability and job security. I mentioned to some people I was learning clojure. Everyone was super into this. People started telling me I was really cool. The author of this article must certainly not be in the same "tech bubble" I'm in, where telling someone you're interested in Clojure is going to be met more with neutral "what?" and "why?" reactions. However, I certainly agree with the title of the article: "signaling in tech is some fucked up shit".
dkarl 8y ago
The attitude has changed as people have realized the web isn't going away and isn't qualitatively changing. Fifteen years ago you could ask, "Why on earth would a programmer put up with that incoherent mishmash of shitty technologies? For God's sake, if you have any taste at all, work in a different domain." Now the why is clear, and anyone who had a snobbish attitude (I won't hold my breath while the rest of us out themselves) probably feels a little dumb. I peeked inside the web UI domain a long time ago and said "noooooo thank you, I will come back when this shit gets sorted out." I figured in five or ten years there would be something entirely different (something that made sense) and I would start from scratch on an even playing field, and HTML/CSS and Javascript would end up like Cobol. Now instead of feeling smart for skipping it, I just feel behind, and the people who slogged through that era have earned (really, really earned) a deeper understanding of the technology behind our generation's most influential way of reaching people with information and ideas.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  As someone who has slogged through it for 20 years, I wouldn't say I've earned much other than to realize that its all an even bigger mess than what it used to be. The solutions people come up with to combat it (frameworks, JSX, CSS-in-JS) only exacerbate the complexity in my opinion. I truly feel like we're headed in the wrong direction when it comes to web development. I haven't figured out what the right direction is yet, short of going back to the drawing board with HTML.
  - idontpost 8y ago
    > I haven't figured out what the right direction is yet, short of going back to the drawing board with HTML. That's almost certainly what's needed. The fundamental structure of the HTML-CSS-JS triad is the problem that all this complexity tries to abstract around. Separation of concerns is only good if you're separating the right concerns. Back when web pages were really PAGES (ie documents), the Content-Styling-Interactivity division made sense. But now that web pages are applications that division makes very little sense. All the different solutions represent different approaches to redefining the separation of concerns, but what they all agree on is that Content-Styling-Interactivity is the wrong separation.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
It's a little less baffling when one realizes that 'front end' work often involves dealing with more arbitrary and byzantine rubbish than in other areas (I'm looking at you HTML 5). The lack of respect for how difficult it can be to make a smooth user experience is in a way understandable. But the truth is front-end people spend at least 1/2 their time in Chinese finger traps ...
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Hard and intimidating doesn’t necessarily mean interesting, I think a lot of the bias against web dev is hovering in the latter and not the former. Note, I’m not saying that web dev isn’t interesting, just that the common perception against it is rooted in interest rather challenge (like it was for database in the decades before). More to the point, why would people want to work in a hard and intimidating area anyways? If it was fun and interesting, it might be challenging but not intimidating. Again, I’m not making judgements in web dev, just on how biased perceptions go.
RandomInteger4 8y ago
The worst part for me is trying to find work as a self-taught web developer and people somehow magically hear the word 'designer' instead of 'developer'.
randomdata 8y ago
The web is 'easy' in the sense that it is well (at least in quantity) documented. If there is something you need to know, it is unlikely that you will have much trouble finding it. Justified or not, I am unsurprised that people with more esoteric knowledge, that is not easily found through a Google search, want to try and boast about it. That's pretty standard human behaviour.
bsder 8y ago
> Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. I think Web Dev and App Dev get such a bad rap because the half-life of the knowledge there is so short that length of experience isn't the signal that it is in other areas (and sometimes it can be an anti-signal).
webthrowaway 8y ago
It does, though. Isn't it possible that other programmers disparage web development not for being easy, but because it's unnecessarily complex? Even of people who look down on "web development", I don't see anyone claiming that writing Google.com is easy. There's lots of types of projects that I don't think very highly of, even if technically challenging and competently implemented, simply for being not worthwhile.
apersona 8y ago
What other work have you done though? From my experience, it seems like a lot of web dev people struggle with OS/Compilers/Embedded/Robotics work, but people who don't struggle with OS/Compilers/Embedded/Robotics work tend to handle web dev just fine. Why is that? The only explanation I can think of is because the work is easier (easier, not trivial). (Note: I don't think a web developer (or anyone) should be considered a "lower class" of coder, but saying web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work feels untrue).
- zach43 8y ago
  i think the real reason for this is related to the availability of easy-to-use and up to date learning materials, more than anything else Those people who are good at OS/Compilers etc would still need to use a tutorial to pick up HTML/CSS/JS...and due to the popularity and inclusiveness of the web dev community, they will find it relatively easy to find high quality interactive tutorials that can get them up and running quite quickly. Additionally a lot of the web is designed to be easy to use...its the reason why we're all using HTML5 and not XHTML right now. I think of the current competition between Vue, React, Angular and others to basically be an ease-of-use competition. Its genuinely quite cool that web developers are making fairly tricky concepts easy to use with these libraries. On the other hand, a lot of material about OSes, compilers, embedded systems is relatively obscure, frequently out of date, possibly difficult to find outside textbooks and research papers, and open source libraries in these domains might even require looking through source code just to figure out how to use a library. A lot of these communities are also indirectly elitist, leading to various sorts of bootstrapping problems for newcomers (I've heard "if you can't build the Linux kernel, why are you even trying to learn about it" several times on different mailing lists :/) As a personal anecdote, I work on compiler and OS things as part of my job, and most people on my team have a high degree of respect towards web dev work. There are only 2 people on my team who think that we could easily do some light web dev: me and another colleague, both of us who've done actual web dev jobs for several years before transferring to our current team. So I don't think web dev is easier, but just far more accessible than a lot of other fields.
blub 8y ago
Honestly I don't think web developers will ever be respected, even if every other type of developer disappears from the face of the Earth. That's because of: * an over-inflated sense of importance (see the comparison with the moon landing) * aggressiveness (see the endless statements about killing the desktop, mobile, etc) * low barrier to entry and high population numbers to entry resulting in lots of ignorance * attention deficit (see the endless churn in frameworks, libraries, solutions) * and poor technical craftsmanship (at the end of the day, the solutions offered have poor performance and poor platform integration). This is justified by the fact that these poor technologies are making webdevs more productive. Not all of the above apply to back-end webdev, those devs are more relaxed. Unfortunately they're being assimilated by the front-end.

by SCdF 8y ago

axlee 8y ago

Whoever says web is "easy" never had to build or maintain a large web application. The ecosystem is incredibly deep and constantly evolving, to the point where best practices change every six months.

Zelphyr 8y ago
Not to mention; web developers are constantly having to context switch between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Old school days they also had a backend language like PHP or Perl. Many still do. Then there was/is SQL. By my count, that's at least five different languages to know all at once.
- shawn 8y ago
  “Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!” “Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?” “Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”
  - pault 8y ago
    I don't understand your analogy. What is walking to the store without juggling any plates in web development? I'm not aware of any stack that allows you to write styles, markup, business logic, and database queries in a single language.
    - Zelphyr 8y ago
      I don't understand the analogy either but I do know that when I'm doing iOS development it's almost always all in Swift. Sometimes some C or Objective-C or even C++ smattered in but that actually kinda proves my point because when I have to deal with one of those languages in a Swift project I slow down.
    - shawn 8y ago
      Arc does, fwiw. And that’s an important design goal. There is a lot of progress left to be made in this space.
    - ken 8y ago
      I'm doing that today with Clojure/EDN: Garden, Reagent, Clojure/ClojureScript, HoneySQL. (You might think it cheating somewhat because HoneySQL is just a thin syntactic wrapper on SQL, but then again, if I weren't cheap/poor, I could use Datomic, where it really is the same language.)
    - doublecouponday 8y ago
      In C#, you can almost do everything in a single language (linq to sql, model binding). You still need extensible application markup language (XAML) for the view.
  - expertentipp 8y ago
    Isn’t using Java, PyTorch, Elasticsearch, and neural networks for a TODO iOS app the same?
    - Zelphyr 8y ago
      Why would you use any of those technologies to build a TODO app?
      - expertentipp 8y ago
        My point is that overengineering and CV- or grant- driven development is not exclusive to the web.
      - spiritcat 8y ago
        Well instead of you telling TODO app what you have to do, TODO app tells you what you have to do, and that frees you up to think about doing it. Or it just does it for you and you go to beach.
    - hdkmraf 8y ago
      This made me burst in laughter. I am indeed using Java and Elasticsearch, and no PyTorch, but Spark for an app I am working on. Way more complex than it should be.
  - danso 8y ago
    Non-trivial websites are more complicated than walking to the store.
- amalcon 8y ago
  It's a little weird to count a markup language, a presentation language, and a query language on the same axis as Turing-complete programming languages. If we go by that metric, the average sysadmin knows dozens of languages all at once. Yet sysadmin work is also often looked down on for some reason. I don't have a good explanation for either of those phenomena, but I think language-counting isn't a good way to combat them.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - oneplane 8y ago
    I think those markup and styling languages and even SQL have all been used in turing-completeness examples. Everything is bad, nothing is easy, and we might as well stop using the internet. We're all going really fast, but nobody knows where ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - Zelphyr 8y ago
    I've done sysadmin work as well and the context switching didn't feel as prohibitive. Generally I was using something like Perl, Python, Bash, etc... but rarely switching between more than one in any given day. With web development, I have to know HTML, CSS, and JS at least. I probably really need to know SQL. And I switch between those four (at least) every day, many times a day.
- flukus 8y ago
  Before "full stack" was invented that used to be spread out across 2 or more jobs, you'd have frontend people, backend people, maybe database people, maybe even designers in addition to the front end people. The context switching existed but not at the same frequency.

expertentipp 8y ago

I’m there and cannot stand it. In my company, for the native apps each problem has it’s own dedicated team. Including ML team which doesn’t have any results yet. I’m the only „cloud” person, everyone assumes that anyting „web” takes 0 time and effort to complete. I truly hate these people. BTW it’s Germany - when they hear „internet” their brains turn into a pile of rotten cabbage.

nerdponx 8y ago

This is nuts. The reason I avoid web dev is that it's complicated and hectic.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

narag 8y ago

Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. The reason is how a lot of companies do web: sloppyly and pay peanuts.

BurningFrog 8y ago

The problem is that you're both right. Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do. Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”. And it is equally legitimately "web development"...

jacques_chester 8y ago
I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon).
- amelius 8y ago
  If rockets were built like software ... (insert joke)
- warty 8y ago
  400k - wow that puts things to scale. This sort of comparison really should have been in my schooling textbooks.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  Well, I did say they were smaller projects :) But you're of course right that I exaggerated a bit for effect. I do that sometimes. My point still stands if you slice a few orders of magnitude off my hyperbole.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    I don't disagree that Google and Facebook do enormous amounts of difficult engineering (I recently saw a USAF slide which compared Google's R&D spending on software to the entire defence industry's). But the Apollo program and the Manhattan project were something else. Arguably they represent the historical highwater marks in terms of megaprojects which had effectively unlimited resources in the face of wide-open, unsolved problems.

themagician 8y ago

The inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff. Tech is the new Wall Street in a lot of ways. But instead of being honest about where the paycheck comes from we gloss it up so it’s less morally reprehensible. I actually have more respect for people on Wall Street these days. At least they are honest with themselves about the game. I think I have more respect for Jordan Belfort and Lou Pai then the exec teams af Facebook and Uber.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
>The inflated sense of ego associated with “saving the world” and “solving tough problems” has almost completely turned me off from tech, in the Bay Area in particular. My problem isn’t with the sentiment—it’s that 99 out of 100 times it’s pure bullshit. There are a few people out their doing really amazing things, but the vast majority of people who have big egos aren’t the people working on that stuff. I see this mindset in Seattle very often. A lot of my friends have recently been quitting their jobs to do something other than tech because of the overly inflated egos and the need for software engineers to constantly "do something new" instead of just maintaining & fix what they already have.
- zBard 8y ago
  Or they get tired/can't keep up with having to continuously learn and adapt, which cognitive dissonance defensively turns into disdain for 'something new'.
bokonon12 8y ago
As a web developer I've even come across other web devs who are chasing "hard problems" and claim CRUD apps are easy and boring. Yet many of them still manage to write nearly-unmaintainable and rigid APIs etc. They haven't even figured out the "basics" but want to go straight for the "hard problems".

userbinator 8y ago

As someone at the "other extreme" end from web developers, and having briefly done some "real web dev" myself, I can easily see why it's so loathed. There are immense amounts of churn. The continuing "appification" and bloating of websites with user and privacy-hostile crap. Reinventing ever-more-complex solutions to non-existent problems (remember the left-pad debacle?) Dogmatic cargo-cult thinking. Sadly, it's rare that a website "redesign" is an actual improvement instead of pure fashion-chasing. (Whether that complexity is 'justified' is an entirely different discussion that, while no doubt interesting, has nothing to do with this person's post) IMHO that has everything to do with it. It's hard to have any other opinion of web developers when you constantly see the large amounts of unnecessary complexity they foist upon everyone else. As I said, I worked in that space briefly, with others who had severe "framework envy", and largely see this complexity as being self-inflicted --- in some ways it was like Enterprise Java (another thing I did for a similarly brief time), except with much more churn. On more than one occasion I've had to clean up the mess they made by rewriting large web apps with simpler means, and the result was better by every metric (speed, memory, lines of code, etc.) except perhaps fashionability and job security. I mentioned to some people I was learning clojure. Everyone was super into this. People started telling me I was really cool. The author of this article must certainly not be in the same "tech bubble" I'm in, where telling someone you're interested in Clojure is going to be met more with neutral "what?" and "why?" reactions. However, I certainly agree with the title of the article: "signaling in tech is some fucked up shit".

dkarl 8y ago

The attitude has changed as people have realized the web isn't going away and isn't qualitatively changing. Fifteen years ago you could ask, "Why on earth would a programmer put up with that incoherent mishmash of shitty technologies? For God's sake, if you have any taste at all, work in a different domain." Now the why is clear, and anyone who had a snobbish attitude (I won't hold my breath while the rest of us out themselves) probably feels a little dumb. I peeked inside the web UI domain a long time ago and said "noooooo thank you, I will come back when this shit gets sorted out." I figured in five or ten years there would be something entirely different (something that made sense) and I would start from scratch on an even playing field, and HTML/CSS and Javascript would end up like Cobol. Now instead of feeling smart for skipping it, I just feel behind, and the people who slogged through that era have earned (really, really earned) a deeper understanding of the technology behind our generation's most influential way of reaching people with information and ideas.

Zelphyr 8y ago
As someone who has slogged through it for 20 years, I wouldn't say I've earned much other than to realize that its all an even bigger mess than what it used to be. The solutions people come up with to combat it (frameworks, JSX, CSS-in-JS) only exacerbate the complexity in my opinion. I truly feel like we're headed in the wrong direction when it comes to web development. I haven't figured out what the right direction is yet, short of going back to the drawing board with HTML.
- idontpost 8y ago
  > I haven't figured out what the right direction is yet, short of going back to the drawing board with HTML. That's almost certainly what's needed. The fundamental structure of the HTML-CSS-JS triad is the problem that all this complexity tries to abstract around. Separation of concerns is only good if you're separating the right concerns. Back when web pages were really PAGES (ie documents), the Content-Styling-Interactivity division made sense. But now that web pages are applications that division makes very little sense. All the different solutions represent different approaches to redefining the separation of concerns, but what they all agree on is that Content-Styling-Interactivity is the wrong separation.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

It's a little less baffling when one realizes that 'front end' work often involves dealing with more arbitrary and byzantine rubbish than in other areas (I'm looking at you HTML 5). The lack of respect for how difficult it can be to make a smooth user experience is in a way understandable. But the truth is front-end people spend at least 1/2 their time in Chinese finger traps ...

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

Hard and intimidating doesn’t necessarily mean interesting, I think a lot of the bias against web dev is hovering in the latter and not the former. Note, I’m not saying that web dev isn’t interesting, just that the common perception against it is rooted in interest rather challenge (like it was for database in the decades before). More to the point, why would people want to work in a hard and intimidating area anyways? If it was fun and interesting, it might be challenging but not intimidating. Again, I’m not making judgements in web dev, just on how biased perceptions go.

RandomInteger4 8y ago

The worst part for me is trying to find work as a self-taught web developer and people somehow magically hear the word 'designer' instead of 'developer'.

randomdata 8y ago

The web is 'easy' in the sense that it is well (at least in quantity) documented. If there is something you need to know, it is unlikely that you will have much trouble finding it. Justified or not, I am unsurprised that people with more esoteric knowledge, that is not easily found through a Google search, want to try and boast about it. That's pretty standard human behaviour.

bsder 8y ago

> Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. I think Web Dev and App Dev get such a bad rap because the half-life of the knowledge there is so short that length of experience isn't the signal that it is in other areas (and sometimes it can be an anti-signal).

webthrowaway 8y ago

It does, though. Isn't it possible that other programmers disparage web development not for being easy, but because it's unnecessarily complex? Even of people who look down on "web development", I don't see anyone claiming that writing Google.com is easy. There's lots of types of projects that I don't think very highly of, even if technically challenging and competently implemented, simply for being not worthwhile.

apersona 8y ago

What other work have you done though? From my experience, it seems like a lot of web dev people struggle with OS/Compilers/Embedded/Robotics work, but people who don't struggle with OS/Compilers/Embedded/Robotics work tend to handle web dev just fine. Why is that? The only explanation I can think of is because the work is easier (easier, not trivial). (Note: I don't think a web developer (or anyone) should be considered a "lower class" of coder, but saying web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work feels untrue).

zach43 8y ago
i think the real reason for this is related to the availability of easy-to-use and up to date learning materials, more than anything else Those people who are good at OS/Compilers etc would still need to use a tutorial to pick up HTML/CSS/JS...and due to the popularity and inclusiveness of the web dev community, they will find it relatively easy to find high quality interactive tutorials that can get them up and running quite quickly. Additionally a lot of the web is designed to be easy to use...its the reason why we're all using HTML5 and not XHTML right now. I think of the current competition between Vue, React, Angular and others to basically be an ease-of-use competition. Its genuinely quite cool that web developers are making fairly tricky concepts easy to use with these libraries. On the other hand, a lot of material about OSes, compilers, embedded systems is relatively obscure, frequently out of date, possibly difficult to find outside textbooks and research papers, and open source libraries in these domains might even require looking through source code just to figure out how to use a library. A lot of these communities are also indirectly elitist, leading to various sorts of bootstrapping problems for newcomers (I've heard "if you can't build the Linux kernel, why are you even trying to learn about it" several times on different mailing lists :/) As a personal anecdote, I work on compiler and OS things as part of my job, and most people on my team have a high degree of respect towards web dev work. There are only 2 people on my team who think that we could easily do some light web dev: me and another colleague, both of us who've done actual web dev jobs for several years before transferring to our current team. So I don't think web dev is easier, but just far more accessible than a lot of other fields.

blub 8y ago

Honestly I don't think web developers will ever be respected, even if every other type of developer disappears from the face of the Earth. That's because of: * an over-inflated sense of importance (see the comparison with the moon landing) * aggressiveness (see the endless statements about killing the desktop, mobile, etc) * low barrier to entry and high population numbers to entry resulting in lots of ignorance * attention deficit (see the endless churn in frameworks, libraries, solutions) * and poor technical craftsmanship (at the end of the day, the solutions offered have poor performance and poor platform integration). This is justified by the fact that these poor technologies are making webdevs more productive. Not all of the above apply to back-end webdev, those devs are more relaxed. Unfortunately they're being assimilated by the front-end.