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I've decided to "rotate out" of CRUD-ish web and app development for these very reasons, after doing it for about 15 years. I can't help but feel most of the sk

by gfodor 12y ago

I've decided to "rotate out" of CRUD-ish web and app development for these very reasons, after doing it for about 15 years. I can't help but feel most of the skills that developers have that get them showered with high paying, high security jobs are on a crash course with being commoditized. It's only going to get easier to develop networked data-flow oriented applications that solve business problems, so if you want security in your career you should be working on things that are, at least for now, deeply challenging and have a reasonably high knowledge barrier to entry. Particularly things that require some serious domain knowledge that your average software engineer won't pick up naturally in a short time on the job. Rails app development is not that.

thatthatis 12y ago
Whether the wave of abstraction drowns you or propels you depends on whether try to fight it or learn to surf it I personally love that about every year or 18 months the time it would take me to build a particular feature set drops by about half (either because libraries have arisen, I gained experience, or I have code that does half of it already). If you're not putting yourself out of a job every six months or so, someone else will.
- gfodor 12y ago
  web developers like the OP can very easily go the way of any other field that has been killed by sufficient automation. i don't see CRUD-app development as a robust, long term skill, despite how well paying it has been the last decade. if you consider 'surfing' to mean always being up on the latest web framework or library, as many do, then I think that is too narrow a scope to consider yourself immune from being automated out of a job. if you consider 'surfing' to be looking at broader strokes in other areas of computer science and software eating the world in general, then that's a different story. you have to diversify.
  - thatthatis 12y ago
    I agree that broader software is one way to surf. I also think writing the automation that puts you out of a job is another way. Crud is never going to go away but the disequilibrium will, and many use cases will get reduced to libraries or packages.
noname123 12y ago
Good for you gfodor. I used to do a lot of jQuery, ASP.net, Rails/PHP front-end development and honestly even some of the backend stuff I did was basic CRUD. I've been trading options for the past three years and wrote an automated trading framework that uses message queues, reactor pattern that I've been QAing and plan to go live soon on my real brokerage account. I don't want to make money honestly at this point but using this project to learn about distributed programming, numerical methods and also functional languages. I saw on your profile that you used to work for Etsy and I've known a few peeps who also worked for them. So I understand where you're coming from when web dev is really nice and a golden handcuff but you don't want to stay stagnant and keep learning new things.
Spooky23 12y ago
You're spot on. IT is in the same place... I was at one org that has something like 90 people fiddling with VMWare. They probably need 10 -- I wouldn't want to be the junior guy on that crew.

by gfodor 12y ago

thatthatis 12y ago

Whether the wave of abstraction drowns you or propels you depends on whether try to fight it or learn to surf it I personally love that about every year or 18 months the time it would take me to build a particular feature set drops by about half (either because libraries have arisen, I gained experience, or I have code that does half of it already). If you're not putting yourself out of a job every six months or so, someone else will.

gfodor 12y ago
web developers like the OP can very easily go the way of any other field that has been killed by sufficient automation. i don't see CRUD-app development as a robust, long term skill, despite how well paying it has been the last decade. if you consider 'surfing' to mean always being up on the latest web framework or library, as many do, then I think that is too narrow a scope to consider yourself immune from being automated out of a job. if you consider 'surfing' to be looking at broader strokes in other areas of computer science and software eating the world in general, then that's a different story. you have to diversify.
- thatthatis 12y ago
  I agree that broader software is one way to surf. I also think writing the automation that puts you out of a job is another way. Crud is never going to go away but the disequilibrium will, and many use cases will get reduced to libraries or packages.

noname123 12y ago

Good for you gfodor. I used to do a lot of jQuery, ASP.net, Rails/PHP front-end development and honestly even some of the backend stuff I did was basic CRUD. I've been trading options for the past three years and wrote an automated trading framework that uses message queues, reactor pattern that I've been QAing and plan to go live soon on my real brokerage account. I don't want to make money honestly at this point but using this project to learn about distributed programming, numerical methods and also functional languages. I saw on your profile that you used to work for Etsy and I've known a few peeps who also worked for them. So I understand where you're coming from when web dev is really nice and a golden handcuff but you don't want to stay stagnant and keep learning new things.

Spooky23 12y ago

You're spot on. IT is in the same place... I was at one org that has something like 90 people fiddling with VMWare. They probably need 10 -- I wouldn't want to be the junior guy on that crew.