
Is it boring working in Web Development startups? - raviojha
https://dev.to/ivarojha/is-it-boring-working-in-web-development-startups-1715
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Raidion
This is such a click bait headline I don't even want to comment. Web
Development is boring if you think it's boring. A lot of people don't. If you
do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need programmers to
solve different problems in different ways. If you don't think it's boring,
hey that's awesome, you keep on making cool stuff.

If you're bored, it's probably time to start job hunting.

~~~
orblivion
> If you do think it's boring, there are a lot of industries that need
> programmers to solve different problems in different ways.

Dumb, overly broad question, but I gotta ask at some point - does anyone have
suggestions for figuring out what industries are out there, what they're like,
where one may want to try next, how one might break into them? Career
navigation isn't my strong suit, as you can probably guess.

~~~
BossingAround
That's actually a really good question. The thing is, this differs wildly on
where you are (or where you want to be, geographically wise). In some cities,
you might see entirely different positions just because there are different
companies with different needs (e.g. security analysts near big bank
headquarters). I too would like a general list of popular programming-related
positions though.

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com2kid
For many developers, UIs are often the most rewarding part of code to work on,
the impact of making a change is immediate and obvious, and hey, pretty stuff
is fun to make!

That said, the learning curve before HTML/CSS is "pain free" to develop with
is huge. Especially compared to mobile frameworks, a native UI widget is
easier to style and place on the screen. Also it'll probably keep rendering
properly for the foreseeable future. (Or write a Windows app and it'll keep
working until the end of time! :)

I've struggled a bit when I have to switch over to writing back end code for
my startup. Some of it is mentally rewarding, writing a scheduling system for
example, but other parts are just tedious, especially the CRUD stuff.

Of course worst of all was writing the scripts for and documenting how to do
deployments. People who enjoy DevOps are kinda weird. ;)

As an aside, awhile back I threw together a simple WinForms app to do some
trivial CRUD work in my DB. I have full Auth + Data Binding + UI working in ~2
hours. I hadn't used C# or Winforms in a few years. Porting that same UI over
to the web took way too long. Getting the tooling up and running was a day! I
hit a bug involving a release version of some NPM package that took hours to
debug and then the framework I installed was using the globally installed
version of Typescript instead of its own local version which took while to
figure out and, well, a few more things like that. :/

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balabaster
In my experience, working in startups is anything but boring. You have to wear
all hats and solve all problems. You have to be ready to think on your feet.
You've gotta be able to think fast and act and be able to deal with the
consequences of your actions on the fly. This is start up life. It's exciting,
but it's stressful. Some might call it a baptism of fire.

Working in startups - especially if they have funding, is definitely not what
I'd call boring.

If you're thinking about a startup, you need to be comfortable doing full
stack dev, testing, infrastructure, operations, debugging in production,
debugging on your local dev, databases both querying and architecture, unit
testing, integration testing, functional testing, scalability and being able
to be ripped out of whatever it is you're doing that needed to be finished
yesterday to debug the server that just went down taking out your primary
income stream; and then when it's done and you've high fived a couple of
people, you need to be able to sit right back down and get the shit out of the
door you got ripped away from to do that.

This is startup life. If you don't like the heat, you'd definitely better stay
out of the kitchen.

If you're working in a startup and you're finding it boring, then chances are
this startup isn't going anywhere. Time to get your CV out.

~~~
eropple
_> If you're thinking about a startup, you need to be comfortable doing ..._

This list is good advice for anyone, not just startup employees. It's also
really optimistic as pertains to startups, and comes off as some myth-making
stuff. (Startups don't deserve myth-making and they definitely aren't
glamorous. If it isn't _your baby_ , then it's _a job_. Woe betide you if you
don't keep that in mind.)

I agree that anybody should be capable of those things--though to be honest I
say that about wherever you're working, "specialization is for insects" is one
of the only Heinlein quotes teenage-me liked that I think still fits--but the
reality is that the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of developers at
startups don't have most of those skillsets when they walk in the door.

I consulted for quite a while and most of my clients were startups. In my
experience, most startups before or at the "elbow curve" of growth have zero
to "a few" senior engineers (the group of whom may include the technical co-
founder/co-founders) with a broad skillset, a lot of juniors (the group of
whom may include the technical co-founder/co-founders, they just don't know it
yet) who have fallen for an okeydoke of an under-market salary and toilet-
paper options, and zero to one principal engineer (the group of whom may
include one of the technical co-founders) who is paid something within smoke-
signal distance of market rate and is expected to perform miracles on a daily
basis.

You will, to be clear, learn a lot of the stuff in that list if you're at a
small, growing startup; you'll have to. Whether you do it right, or whether
you do it right enough to do it at your next job...good question. I _really_
wouldn't expect most developers to party on in with even a majority of those
things already nailed down, though.

If they did, most startups couldn't afford them.

~~~
balabaster
Yep, eventually you become sufficiently skilled at enough of those disciplines
as to be able to call yourself a specialist in many/most of them. At which
point, you're either in high enough demand that only those that are desperate
for you are willing to pay, or you're priced out of the market... or you still
just do it for fun.

And yes, in a startup you _will_ learn these things, whether you want to or
not... and that growth curve will be painful. And you'll either thrive, or
you'll die.

~~~
eropple
Doing it for the love of the game is certainly an option, I don't mean to
exclude that. I'm going to my next gig for something a little under-market
because I think they're good people and I like the vibe there. (It helps that
there's a big video component to what they do, and I do a lot of video stuff
for fun already and want to learn and contribute there in addition to my usual
infra/mobile/frontend/backend nonsense.)

Just saying that most people coming in the door, the sorts of folks who are
going to be asking this sort of question, are just not in the same position as
you or I are. ;)

~~~
balabaster
I went from corporate to startup... and now I just don't seem to be able to go
back to corporate. Once you've had that baptism, if it didn't kill you, it's
part of you. There's no going back to sitting in a cubicle after that kind of
excitement.

~~~
eropple
The heroification and myth-making is, again, I think a little much. It's a
job, it's working to make somebody else wealthy. It's not "a part of you" any
more than any other job; it just becomes what you're used to.

Frankly I think most people who have taken a few turns in startup-land should
try freelance consulting on for size. I'm explicitly not doing it right now
for other, personal reasons, but I'll go back to it eventually; it's the arena
in which your skills are really as-fairly-as-possible valued and where you can
realize some really outlandishly-sized gains for a lot of organizations if you
hustle.

And, having spent time in startups, you've already internalized that your job
might disappear tomorrow. ;) Consulting at least lets you spread out that risk
both in terms of clients and in terms of billing.

~~~
balabaster
It's not about heroification and myth-making or what you're used to. It's
entirely about the excitement found in the chaos, and either you thrive on
that, or you hate it... or you get Stockholm Syndrome and learn to love it
because of the psychological trauma of running that gauntlet.

It's stressful for sure, in a manner not dissimilar to jumping out of a plane
for the first time. The rollercoaster of emotions. The dread and worry about
how the fuck you're going to pull off the impossible. The heartbreak you feel
as you think you're just not going to be good enough to pull it off this time.
The relief when you manage it again. The exhilaration of having come through
it, perhaps with some bumps and bruises, but you made it and it didn't kill
you.

Work in this kind of environment long enough and it will either break you or
make you feel like there's nothing you can't do. One thing's for certain
though, it _does_ change you, in a way that those who haven't worked in
startups will never quite understand.

Consulting is certainly a different mindset. You can either become attached to
the project and make it as much your baby as the rest of the team, or you can
function as mentor and help them to grow to the point they can handle it
themselves. There's a lot of satisfaction in this. I find that the more
emotionally involved I am in a project, the more fulfilling it is. The more
detached I remain, the less so. I get a lot of enjoyment about being part of a
team coming together for the achievement of a goal - even if that goal is to
make someone else rich. When a project is personal, and by personal, I mean
I'm emotionally attached to the outcome and I am vested in seeing it succeed,
the emotional highs and lows are where the magic is found... that's what makes
me feel alive and that is what I live for.

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danielovichdk
Boring, No.

Painful, Yes.

I have programmed to the Web in 20 years and it has become worse over the
years.

I believe, that if you make an effort and stay vanilla you will enjoy the work
many fold.

I love the Web but it's not the Web it was yesterday. Unfortuneatly imho

~~~
thrower123
Exactly, I wouldn't call it boring. Things break in interesting new ways all
the time, and you have to constantly be learning, because the pace of change
is so breakneck.

It's frustrating as all hell though. Debuggers and tooling are in a pretty sad
state in comparison to what I'm used to developing server-side and desktop
applications, and the iteration loop for making simple changes can be pretty
bad, depending on how involved your JS compilation and build pipeline is.

~~~
eropple
I feel like the pace of change has slowed a lot over the last few years, to be
honest, and I wouldn't use that argument as a reason to not get into web
development today.

I kind of divide web development into three eras: pre-jQuery, jQuery, and
post-jQuery. There was a lot of thrash in the pre-jQuery-to-jQuery era;
remember MooTools? my first job was using that in _2010_ , that sure was a
time to be doing that kind of thing. I missed most of the jQuery era because I
was busy building the systems that the jQuery folks talked to, so I can't
speak too much about that, but it seemed relatively stable, if not static, for
a long time. And just as I was getting back into web development there was
also a lot of thrash in the jQuery-to-post-jQuery era; Angular 1 or Angular 2
while wearing your regulation blue tie or React cool-kids wearing sunglasses
at night and you've got the Ember guys over here quietly doing things and I am
contractually obligated to mention Vue or I will have between two and thirty
responses saying that I forgot about Vue, it's the Ansible of the frontend
world.

But at this point it seems...mostly stable? The browsers are mostly
predictable and mostly cover everything the 99% case cares about, everybody's
browser engine is _fast enough_ even if it isn't _fast_ , and the various
ecosystems out there have off-the-shelf solutions for most things and the
crowd of Github starrers have given the rest of us decent signals as to what
we should give a real look at. I feel like debuggers have gotten a lot
_better_ , though admittedly not at the level of something like IntelliJ; I
have VSCode set up to breakpoint TypeScript (aside: a lot of what made
frontend/JS development suck _a lot less_ was TypeScript winning the
metaphorical war) in Firefox and the experience is pretty clean.

Build pipelines can still be bad. Kind of a "doctor, it hurts when I do this"
problem, though. Happy-path pipelines seem pretty speedy, although I do most
of my development on a thoroughly un-heat-throttled Linux desktop rather than
the metric standard Macbook Pro.

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techbio
The article sets up the idea that 80-90% of a project gets done well, but the
rest gets ignored because it is boring. However, the article does not describe
what the boring parts are, or how to integrate them in scheduling to dull the
pain.

I did like the idea of taking a break before product launch. The push to make
a deadline carried forward into a release brings charged emotions that won't
match the new users'.

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travisl12
This article seems to be saying that getting the data infrastructure built
(i.e. backend) is the exciting part, but when it's time to build the front end
it becomes boring.

Is that because it's boring, or is it because people think front end is
easy/straightforward and then realize it's not? I'd argue that the front end
is a much more difficult task than the backend in the beginning of a startup.

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imesh
I find it boring, but that's why I'm trying to get out of the industry and
find an alternate career. Software development has broke me.

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nateferrero
If the title ends in a ?, the answer is a definitive "No".

~~~
zenojevski
"Should women have a right to vote?"

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jgwil2
If work is boring, it's probably repetitive. If it's repetitive, you should
automate it. I think this applies to any kind of development.

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genmon
Betteridge's Law applies
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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asark
Huh, the rare and elusive Betteridge's law exception.

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TomMarius
Not in mine ;-)

There is more to web development than putting in style properties. For example
I deem TypeScript one of the nicest language I've ever worked it, and React
(Native; especially after they introduced hooks), and WASM fascinating
technologies.

