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posted by takyon on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the pity dept.

Stumbled upon this blog entry:

One paragraph from the OP instantly stuck out to me.

I don't want to [be] a typical "code monkey". I want to go deep into low level, even to clear math when we talk about computer science, but at same time, I want to have a job in shorter period of time than let's say 3 years. I was switching so many times between Python, C++, Java and I'm nowhere. I know it's bad practise, it's worst, but I don't know, I'm just confused.

...

Web development has an extremely low barrier to entry in comparison to, say, systems programming. Setting up a Wordpress blog takes significantly less knowledge and effort than building an operating system.
As a consequence, being a web developer does not carry the same prestige as being a software engineer (whatever that is). God have mercy on your soul if HN or /r/programming learns you implemented some common functionality in NodeJS for fun. (Expect the words "web scale" to show up in the comment thread somewhere).
...
As I became more involved in online communities, the narrative became increasingly clear that my confidence and sense of accomplishment were unwarranted. PHP was a terrible language, and PHP developers were terrible programmers. JavaScript was a terrible language, and JS developers couldn't perform asymptotic analysis to save their life. Web developers don't have degrees and it shows in their code. Drupal/Wordpress developers are an absolute joke. Web developers never took a compilers course, so they don't understand just how easy their "jobs" are. Web developers are overpaid for how little they know. Web developers have everything handed to them. Web developers have never had to manage memory or make hard decisions. Web developers have no knowledge of data structures or algorithms. Web developers are not real programmers.

Armed with impulsive spending habits and a sense of urgency, I went to Amazon and purchased just about every programming book not related to web development I could find. Cryptographic protocol implementations in C, Embedded Systems development, Linux Kernel Development, etc. I wanted to learn things that real programmers knew. I wanted to learn the hard things. I bought an Arduino, started hanging out in ##c on freenode, began reading through implementations of the C standard library.
I never fully read any of those books. Most of them I never even started. I didn't do anything substantial with the arduino. I never made it passed analyzing "assert.h" in the C standard library (which I was planning on progressing through alphabetically.)
...
When you hate what you do, you stop caring about it. When you stop caring about something, you aren't going to bother learning more about it.
For a period of nearly 3 years, I was stuck in a terribly unproductive mental state. I hated web development, but I didn't know how to do anything else. Web development was all I knew. Bills needed to be paid, so CRUD apps needed to be made.

And thus arose my main cognitive dilemma: I hated web development because it was easy, but it was never actually easy to me. Instead of concluding "maybe web development is actually hard and those people don't know what they're talking about", I concluded that I must be a terrible programmer.

Question to SN fellows: have you had moments like this (doesn't matter if in relation with Web development or not)? Have you crossed over them? If true, how?


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 26 2015, @01:33PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 26 2015, @01:33PM (#213826) Journal

    This "Web developers are not real programmers" and "they don't understand just how easy their 'jobs' are" sounds a lot like sour grapes to me.

    I think you got it wrong: it is not he was thinking, it was what he was hearing/reading on HN, r /r/programming or other online forums. So much that he started to believe that what's he was doing was crap until he could do it no more; and he can't do something else either for the fear of yet another failure.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tonyPick on Sunday July 26 2015, @02:33PM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Sunday July 26 2015, @02:33PM (#213852) Homepage Journal

    Yeah - the line is:

    The consensus on programming forums is that web developers are the lowest tier of software developers. Web development is easy, it's not real programming, it's just CRUD frameworks and APIs doing all the real work for you

    And I have to say (as a lower level/embedded developer in the day job): That consensus is complete and utter crap. Just because the frameworks exist to build on, it doesn't make the things built on them somehow "not programming" or automatically trivial. It's like saying that hardware design is easy, because somebody else made the capacitors.

    Anytime anyone suggests to you that web development is easy remember to ask "So, why have you have decided not to do this 'easy work' better than everyone currently doing it, and in the process pick up a salary which will allow you to retire in a couple of years?"

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:10PM (#213870)

      "So, why have you have decided not to do this 'easy work' better than everyone currently doing it, and in the process pick up a salary which will allow you to retire in a couple of years?"

      Because I have self respect.

      Web development has pushed past the coder ream anyway. With a web page being 1MB or more, most of it ad and tracking info, it is consuming resources that are best used else where. Now they are pushing this same bloat to smart phones as APP, simple toy interfaces that a simpe web based process could handle. Instead they are eating your power and network access to get more information about you.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:18PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:18PM (#213872)

      why have you have decided not to do this 'easy work' better than everyone currently doing it

      Its like a union shop where being good is defined as following groupthink about graphics art and UI design as closely as possible. Meanwhile every idiot who can make a blog post thinks all you do is open notepad and put in the blink tag and surely they could do it their way (aka "better") in about five minutes, despite it not being true. When you told the users you were making them a better carriage, they thought you were making a mechanical horse instead of a model T and the complaints are starting to roll in. Meanwhile "everyone's a critic" means some kid read an article in wired and insists you change everything to light blue color scheme while hijacking the scroll bar and he must be right because he's a trendy college kid, I mean look at his fedora of might. Also the business requirements changed the week before release and now we need to replace one dropdown with an entire IRS 1040 long form, but we already did training for the internal users, so you can't change anything.

      Note that I'm not claiming its a lowly skill or level, but I am explaining why its an ungodly unholy pain in the ass. Every time I get "stuck" with front end stuff, what agony, those guys earn every penny and then some. Probably making fun of them is some kind of compensation thing for people who want to do that hideous stuff but know they don't have the intestinal fortitude to tolerate it so they lash out. "Ha ha you can add 2+2 and I can't so you're a nerd" but rewritten for an IT script.