4 ms·

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 w

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 On the other hand, a lot of material about OSes, compilers, embedded systems is relatively obscure, frequently out of date, possibly difficult to find outside textbooks and research papers, and open source libraries in these domains might even require looking through source code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.

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.