
I am a Web Dev And I am Burnt Out - earenndil
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/bos684/i_am_a_web_dev_and_i_am_burnt_the_fk_out/
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jaabe
You don’t actually have to setup your web-development environment like the
hype dictates. I mean, work in a Danish municipality with more than 5k
employees and 60k citizens who directly use our, mainly web-based, solutions
daily. We build around 50 a year, and maintain a few hundred of them, and
almost none of them are build with a JavaScript MVVM framework.

Not because Vue/React/Angular aren’t nice, but because we don’t have to. If it
doesn’t need to run offline, then a MVC framework with Ajax will do just fine,
and they are extremely productive. Both because errors are server side, but
also because asp mvc hasn’t really seen radical changes for almost a decade.
We also rarely put things in containers, we don’t do automated CI/CD and we
certainly don’t orchestrate things with Kubernetes. Not that there is anything
wrong with doing that, but we’re not Netflix, we can publish a new build
directly to an IIS during a slow period and no one will notice the service
being gone for 5 seconds.

Sometimes I think it pays to do a little JOMO instead of all that FOMO.
Especially if you don’t want to burn out. Changes are a constant in our
business, but you need to make absolutely certain that adopting those changes
make sense, and it has to make sense in the real world, not on hacker news.
Our business doesn’t care one bit about the front-end tech stack, as long as
it performs like they want it could be written in ASP webforms.

~~~
moonrobin
What do JOMO and FOMO stand for? I think of FOMO as "Fear of Missing Out", the
controversial motivator driving retention for free-to-play games like
Fortnite, but that doesn't seem to be correct in this context.

~~~
jaabe
It’s completely anecdotal but I do hire people and I work as a part time
examiner for CS students, so I do come into contact with what motivates
people. Unfortunately I see a lot of fear driving people to push forward,
picking up technologies because they think they have to, not because they
actually need them.

I mean, if I do a quick search on the Danish job agents, no one is looking for
someone who knows GraphQL. Yet I see people desperately trying to learn it in
their free time because they are afraid of becoming obsolete.

I wonder where this fear comes from. It’s a fairly recent thing in my
experience, and it’s not like it’s a buyers market. We still desperately need
more developers.

~~~
CM30
It probably comes from the internet and how the web development media is
heavily dominated by FAANG companies and trendy startups.

If your reference point is these companies and their developers, then it can
appear like you're getting more obsolete by the day, since they're always
talking about the hottest new tech and you're seemingly not using it.

It's turned web development and software engineering into a game of keeping up
with the joneses. And I suspect just like with social media as a whole, it's
made a lot of people feel like they're inferior to the rest of the
population/their peer group.

But I've got an article about that planned at some point. About how the
Silicon Valley focused tech media and internet has given people the wrong
impression about what most such work is like in most industries.

------
nikkwong
Yeah, I don't know, I feel like the constant framework churn has sort of died
down and javascript is no longer changing the way it was a few years ago. It
essentially moved from being a scripting language a decade ago to the 'full
fledged' programming language it is now. Evolution during that time period was
necessary, and a lot of frameworks and trends turned over pretty quickly. But
now I feel like the JS ecosystem is on a much more stable juncture and not
evolving as much. The most popular MVC frameworks are 5 years old and show no
sign of going anywhere anytime soon. Best practices for tooling have mostly
been decided. I think the web should continue to evolve but I just can't
imagine it being as dramatic as it was over the last decade. Or maybe, I'm
just a dinosaur too.

~~~
Untit1ed
Yeah I find it really weird that he'd write this _now_, when most of the
technology he's referencing is 5+ years old, and there hasn't been that much
churn in the last few years. About 4 years ago I started learning React
sarcastically wondering what the next thing I'd have to learn was would be,
and four years later I'm... still using React, and it's still pretty cutting
edge.

~~~
nikkwong
Yeah, I agree. Strong declarations about what the future will look like
usually are laughably incorrect in retrospect; but, well, without some major
paradigm shifts in how browsers work, I don't really see React/Vue going
anywhere. The only thing I could maybe guess would be some AI that abstracts
the programming away.

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IloveHN84
The real danger is working 14 Hours/day instead of 8. Clearly is a problem of
toxic environment in the office (none notices that you're there for so long
hours every day?).

It's not a problem of tech, which is fluid, but a management problem. You
don't always need the last fancy technology or tool, but pick what you might
think will help you and go for it.

Being pragmatic should be the 1. Point in a developer's career

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stareatgoats
> I work 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM. Then 9:00 PM - 2:00 AM. And in between, I'm "on
> call."

Yeah, don't do that. Primarily, make sure you get at least 10 consecutive
hours off every day, to wind down and sleep usually 8 hours, some need more.
And get some exercise every week, and don't forget to eat healthy. And make
sure you are not so stressed that your primary social relationships involve
yelling or worse.

That will go a long way to prevent burn-out, no matter what industry you are
in.

~~~
kalado
Yeah, this has nothing to do with what he is doing but with how much and how
long. There is a reason we fight for the 8/8/8 standard and why we arestarting
to demand more free time instead of more work.

As you said, 10 hours would be ideal, 2 is sick.

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karmakaze
I'm not a web dev but try to extend back-end to full-stack especially on
personal projects which are mostly to try out something new. I was impressed
by what React achieved but not by codebases using it. Vue was my go-to SPA.
Now it's Svelte with the v3 release. I've yet to use it for anything
substantial but that's my best hope. In the past I've used RoR and even
Yii/php which are impressive. For non-SPA I'd now choose Phoenix/Elixir.

How I stay sane is not to go 'all in' on any framework. My pick for mobile is
Flutter but that could easily change to Kotlin Native or Svelte Native if they
turn out better than the game engine rendering mode. Declare this is my fave
'for now'.

I'm sure this is much harder when you've committed to a stack for a good part
of your career. I tend to grow more tired of companies not adopting new tools
--the pragmatically good ones not just shiny. I'm also always looking for my
next language, maybe Clean or Pony but happy to use Kotlin, TypeScript, or
Dart in the meantime.

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sambal
I am a One Person Agency And I am Burnt Out*

Only one of the complaints is technical related, the rapid pace of front end
development to someone who’s “skipped Node, RoR and Python”.

As a “web dev” for the past two years, previously elsewhere, who has never
worked in an agency, none of this applies. The front end pace absolutely would
have two or three years ago, but things have generally stabilized.

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revskill
I spent about 2 months to setup my "idea" boilerplate with Webpack.

Actually, you just need Typescript and Webpack to have a productive setup with
frontend/universal project.

~~~
timw4mail
Doesn't sound remotely productive then.

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theredbox
I guess use Rails or Django would be the answer.

