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<h1 style="text-align: center;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-76f91702-19f3-3fe2-0fa0-3d35562b0442">Is web development the right career path for you? Some realities of the industry</span></h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
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<li>]&nbsp;by <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johnnymu" target="_blank">johnnymu</a>&nbsp;- shares some of his opinions on web development as a career path.</li>
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<h2>[WHY]</h2>
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<li>]&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
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<li><strong>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</strong></li>
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<li>] <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rU5-t09tEBym1wD3NUr7s9mMgFBmfGJNBz3F8TGzDsU/preview?pli=1&amp;sle=true" target="_blank">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rU5-t09tEBym1wD3NUr7s9mMgFBmfGJNBz3F8TGzDsU/preview?pli=1&amp;sle=true</a></li>
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<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
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<li>] 2015-03-14</li>
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<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
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<li><strong>[is web development the right career for you?]</strong></li>
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<li>] You love technology. You love gadgets. Your friends see you as the technical expert in the group. You love the web and your curiosity may have even lead to you dabbling with some online programming courses.</li>
<li>] If some or even all of the above sound like you, you must at some point have thought about a career in web development&hellip;right?! <br />Before you get too excited, there are more realities of the industry that I should mention. How you feel about these will help determine if web development is something you should invest time in pursuing.</li>
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<li><strong>[Evolution and job security]</strong></li>
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<li><span>]&nbsp;</span><span>what was considered best in class 5 years ago is literally frowned upon now as the technologies and the standard of our applications have evolved rapidly</span></li>
<li><span>] </span><span>- growth of mobile devices as the main consumer of the web rather than desktop applications. Any new site built that is not mobile responsive&hellip;well, that&rsquo;s just poor. We have also seen the growth of the single page application, cloud computing and the explosion of frontend technologies.</span></li>
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<li><strong>[In my day job I interview] </strong></li>
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<li><span>] on average 1 &ndash; 2 people a week. I meet everyone from the enthusiastic junior programmer right through to higher level solution architects.</span></li>
<li><span>] The most likely type of interview to turn into a complete car wreck is that of the mid to senior developer. typically the candidate for this type of role would have some cool technologies listed on their resume and completed an adequate coding test </span></li>
<li><span>] All promising&hellip;right?! Then about 10 minutes into the interview it quickly becomes apparent that the person I am interviewing has simply watched some high level videos on the latest tech listed on their resume and only know it at a high level.</span></li>
<li><span>] They have been working in the same job, with the same technologies, on the same product but when asked what makes you a senior developer, they answer &ldquo;Because I have been coding for 5 years&rdquo;. </span></li>
<li><span>] </span><span>The sad fact is that these people have not been aware of the realities of the industry they have been working in.</span></li>
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<li><strong>[You will start at the bottom]</strong></li>
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<li><span>I recently went to a coding schools recruitment fair. The students had generally been coding for about 3 months and by all accounts I was impressed with the portfolios they had created and their new found passion for web development.</span></li>
<li><span>However with one or maybe two of the students I sensed overbearing confidence that now that could write some code and create prototypes they were valuable commodities in the industry. The fact is that a company that hires these people with so little experience is going to have to make a sustained investment in their skills with training and mentoring over a period of 2 &ndash; 3 years to start seeing them fulfill their potential.</span></li>
<li><span>Everybody starts in the same place. There are no shortcuts. Software development is craftsmanship. Just getting it to work is no longer sufficient. How you get it to work matters, it matters a lot! The maintainability, scalability and attention to detail demonstrated in your solution is just as important as having something that just works.</span></li>
<li><span>Getting really good takes a lot of time, curiosity and effort. You need to get in with a company who has a track record of nurturing talent by providing the projects, training and mentoring for you to grow. Prioritise your career growth over anything else in the early days.</span></li>
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<li><strong>[Coding as a career could be less rewarding than coding as a hobby]</strong></li>
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<li><span>Some people love to cook in their spare time. NOT the same as cooking 40+ hours a week, every week and there was a superior telling them what and how to cook?</span></li>
<li><span>You will learn new things every day but you will not get to choose your projects and the technologies you use for the first few years at least in any reputable company.</span></li>
<li><span>Especially as a junior, there will be times when the work you get assigned does not seem like the most engaging or exciting. You will just need to dig in, hustle and get it done. </span></li>
<li><span>Handle these situations with the professionalism and enthusiasm you would approach any task and you are well on your way to proving yourself worthy of stepping up to showcase your skills on more challenging projects.</span></li>
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<li>
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<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
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<li>]</li>
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<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
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<li>] src = <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9201828" target="_blank">hn comments</a></li>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">comment mine (66)</h1>
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<li>]&nbsp;<span class="comhead"><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mtrpcic" target="_blank">mtrpcic</a></span></li>
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<li>] more comments on reddit also&nbsp;</li>
<li>] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2yb11f/is_web_development_the_right_career_path_for_you/" target="_blank">https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/2yb11f/is_web_development_the_right_career_path_for_you/</a>&nbsp;</li>
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<li>] <span class="comhead"><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=philipn">philipn</a> </span></li>
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<li><span class="comment"><span style="color: #000000;">]&nbsp;I like pretty much everything someone takes the time to write about development, but this rubbed me the wrong way. I'm not sure what it is exactly the author is trying to express here: that engineers need to stay current on new, hot technologies? Everyone knows that. But then he seems to deride people who, based on his interviewing, haven't used a &lt;new technology X&gt; in production / in a new project. </span></span></li>
<li><span class="comment"><span style="color: #000000;">] </span></span>You can't have it both ways. You need to find a way to evaluate people and, through that evaluation, grok whether or not they can pick up a new technology that they aren't already familiar with. If you can't figure that out, your interview process has failed. Think about it: the complexity and difficulty of your own problems vastly exceed the difficulty a senior engineer faces learning a few new frameworks or APIs. If not, you're doing something pretty trivial.</li>
<li>] The best people I've ever worked with weren't people who a priori understood the technology stack we were working with -- instead, they have been seasoned engineers who know how go out and learn, and then apply what they already know in a new environment. This seems so obvious I feel silly even writing it down here, but this is on the front page, so it must be resonating with folks.</li>
<li>] What tptacek has said about .NET developers working at IT departments at huge organizations really rings true here. If you immediately write someone off because they work with technologies you don't work with[1] then you're doing it wrong.</li>
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<li>] <span class="comhead"><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pbowyer" target="_blank">pbowyer</a></span></li>
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<li>] It sounds like the author values language/framework knowledge above expertise. Speaking as a backend dev I find as you move up in seniority it becomes impossible to keep up with the latest technologies. Learning management skills, being move involved in architecting and business development all take time. You may end up doing code reviews, project management and cleaning up the 'legacy' (read broken) parts of the system. Does that make you less valuable?</li>
<li>] To a company that insists on every part of their project being built in the latest cool language/framework (and yes, I still class NodeJS as this) then yes. To a pragmatic company, which may choose NodeJS if it's the best fit, or Rails, or PHP, or Java - no</li>
<li>] <span style="color: #000000;">We're back at the skills vs language debate, one which I thought has been done to death.</span></li>
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<li><strong>] </strong><span class="comhead"><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dodyg" target="_blank">dodyg</a></span></li>
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<li><span class="comment"><span style="color: #000000;">] Linus has been working in the same job, with the same technologies, on the same product ...</span></span></li>
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<li><strong><span class="comment"><span style="color: #000000;">] user </span></span></strong></li>
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<li><span class="comment"><span style="color: #000000;">] These days, I think a junior developer is someone who needs assistance to get their job done. An intermediate developer is one who can get everything done without assistance (although they may still benefit from assistance!). A senior developer is someone who can bring up everybody else's level -- getting assistance in this seems to be a critical prerequisite for success).</span></span></li>
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

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