4 ms·

Programming for the web is my primary career. I first got into it late 1997. I am astonished at how incompetent it is. The fact the OP made a career out of it a

Programming for the web is my primary career. I first got into it late 1997. I am astonished at how incompetent it is. The fact the OP made a career out of it and made some money is hardly amazing. For the level of talent required contrasted against the average compensation I am surprised not everybody is trying it. You too could be earning 6 figures in a low cost of living economy after completing a boot camp and 2 years experience not being any good. Don’t really know how to do your job? No problem. After 30 years web technology standards have largely solidified and cross browser concerns are no longer noticeable. If you work on the front end a large framework and 10000 NPM packages can be pushed into a website to do all the heavy lifting. If that’s not enough jQuery is still a thing. If that’s still not enough the business will simply hire additional bodies to fill the gaps of accessibility and any original problems that might come up. The backend is pretty similar with Spring MVC, Maven, and tons of data packages that perform data or service handling for spring. The last half of my corporate career has been spent trying to untangle the spaghetti mistakes of other developers who probably shouldn’t have writing any unsupervised code as opposed to writing original feature logic. I know many developers have lost their jobs in the current economic crisis. This includes both good developers and really bad developers. In all the bad and disruption that comes from that I hope businesses will become more thoughtful about simply throwing money away on web technologies and developers. Historically businesses have vaguely realized just how bad and incompetent their web technology is but never did anything to fix it. Some businesses, even large mega .coms, would go bust than fix it (and their business). Really the only answer ever applied was hire better talent without defining what that is and without any plan on what to do with or how to apply that new talent. That is a leadership/business problem and not a technology or talent problem. Hiring is not the answer but instead only feeds the problem. It makes sense though, bad leaders aren’t going to blame themselves for problems like this and it’s generally not their money they are throwing away on bad decisions and empty solutions. Other industries have solved these problems long ago. They have things like broker/agent relationships, licensing, continuing education, and personal liability. The incompetence of software does not want any of this. They want the least possible effort to immediate high income.

nsgi 7y ago
Wish it was like that in the UK. I work with some pretty talented people and we're paid what would be considered peanuts in the bay area (but fairly standard here), and even then half of us have just been furloughed. Lots of code sucks but that's often due to unrealistic deadlines as much as the talents of the developers.
- louthy 7y ago
  Code sucks everywhere. Unless you're working on a library or something personal, then there's no (or very few) organisations that are churning out 'academically pure' code. The UK doesn't software industry doesn't have dibs on that.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    Some companies write code that's public, and then, while it might still suck, there is at least some motivation for improving it, and a better chance of it being paletable.
    - Tade0 7y ago
      I've worked for a company which had a 100% open-source product and their priority was to keep that boat floating rather than making any improvements. Probably because the resource requirements to actually be able to do that were way above what they had at their disposal. Especially having such an old codebase.
    - collyw 7y ago
      The time it takes to make simple updates should be enough motivation. I just spent the best part of a day adding a simple dialog before submitting a form. Took forever to get the development environment put together to run the code locally then trying to understand the mess of JavaScript in the relevant function with all it's nested callbacks to add a couple of lines of code. I tried refactoring it a bit, hopefully its a bit more readable for the next person. I doubt anyone will actually give a shit though.

nsgi 7y ago

Wish it was like that in the UK. I work with some pretty talented people and we're paid what would be considered peanuts in the bay area (but fairly standard here), and even then half of us have just been furloughed. Lots of code sucks but that's often due to unrealistic deadlines as much as the talents of the developers.

louthy 7y ago
Code sucks everywhere. Unless you're working on a library or something personal, then there's no (or very few) organisations that are churning out 'academically pure' code. The UK doesn't software industry doesn't have dibs on that.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Some companies write code that's public, and then, while it might still suck, there is at least some motivation for improving it, and a better chance of it being paletable.
  - Tade0 7y ago
    I've worked for a company which had a 100% open-source product and their priority was to keep that boat floating rather than making any improvements. Probably because the resource requirements to actually be able to do that were way above what they had at their disposal. Especially having such an old codebase.
  - collyw 7y ago
    The time it takes to make simple updates should be enough motivation. I just spent the best part of a day adding a simple dialog before submitting a form. Took forever to get the development environment put together to run the code locally then trying to understand the mess of JavaScript in the relevant function with all it's nested callbacks to add a couple of lines of code. I tried refactoring it a bit, hopefully its a bit more readable for the next person. I doubt anyone will actually give a shit though.