So you want to write spagetti in another language because webdev is getting too difficult? In my opinion one should strive to learn their craft well, and if you havent by now, you should very quickly educate yourself out of writing bad code. Otherwise it's a habit that keeps you feeling bad about you and your code and hold you at disadvantage against that competition you are so worried about.
But if you think a break in another domain would just magically make everything better, try becoming an expert in some obscure domain in some not-well reputed company. There most of your work will probably end up be muttering a few words in meetings and drinking coffee, with no one to tell you what to do as they dont really understand your domain.
There are a lot of codebases with really bad code that no one wants to take care of, so findind a gig like that would probably also pay you well.
Honestly it sounds more like OP is stuck int the bad code trap because they work alone. Couple that with web dev and of course the world would seem bleak. Frontend code can be beautiful and maintainable but not having senior people to help you even know what that means sounds frustrating to me. my vote is to join a company as an intern/junior and grow.
100%. I worked alone for a few years. Again self taught web development. I tried to read the “best practices” for the languages I was learning. But it was bugs galore and code I feared maintaining after release.
I then spent 5 months at a company in a team where every bit of code went through a peer review process. Even I was responsible for reviewing others code. I learnt a hell of a lot, we barely had any bugs and if we found a bug, it was usually easy to fix. Since then, writing maintainable and (importantly) readable code is my standard and I try and help other Devs do the same.
It's nice how you are telling the OP to just learn to write nice code and then you support it by anecdote about how others taught you to write nice code.
I am not under the impression that OP wants to continue writing bad code.
That’s exactly what I was referring to. I thought by replying to the comment that mentioned joining a team would have provided the context of what I was agreeing too...
This is one of the most passive offensive responses I have read on this website.
It adds nothing of value and helps no one. Not even you as the author of the comment.
Becoming the 10x engineer everyone dreams of is one thing but definitely not a viable option.
But if you think a break in another domain would just magically make everything better, try becoming an expert in some obscure domain in some not-well reputed company. There most of your work will probably end up be muttering a few words in meetings and drinking coffee, with no one to tell you what to do as they dont really understand your domain.
There are a lot of codebases with really bad code that no one wants to take care of, so findind a gig like that would probably also pay you well.