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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

The web is basically a UI layer these days. Google are technically a 'web' company but there are a hell of a lot of positions available there that don't involve doing any web programming at all. Same at any decently sized company.

I'm afraid I'll have to pursue a masters or doctoral degree in order to pursue jobs in any area outside of the web.

I'm curious - why would you go to the extent of studying for a masters solely to avoid programming for the web? What is it about the web you dislike so much?

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I realize there are a plethora of companies that do interesting things on the back-end (and increasingly a lot of cool stuff on the front), but when it comes down to it the vast majority of (enterprise) web jobs involve getting some information from a database, running it through some business logic, and returning the processed data. That makes it sound easy, but if you happen to work for a large company doing enterprise-level web programming, you know that the sheer scale of the data can make your work mind-mindbogglingly difficult at times. I love a good challenge, but when you're solving the same uninteresting problem over and over... well, you just lose interest.

>solely to avoid programming for the web? What is it about the web you dislike so much?

People can simply be uninterested in certain types of work..

Yeah, I'm basically a 'full-stack' dev right now.

I enjoy thinking about and designing the database schema.

I enjoy writing the back-end code.

I enjoy thinking about the REST API.

I. Can. Not. Fucking. Stand. the front-end work. I don't know why; I just dread doing it for every project I’m assigned.

I can’t wait to hit that 1-year mark and start looking for more back-end oriented gigs.

> I. Can. Not. Fucking. Stand. the front-end work. I don't know why

In my experience, it's a simple matter of it never being done, and people always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need, streamline the steps needed for the most common and/or important tasks, and spend a gazillion hours making it look pretty-- not only will no one be impressed, but someone will always complain about something. There is never any 'right' way to do it. It's a black hole.

With back end stuff, it's like, does it work without making a mess and not overuse resources? Ok, good job! What are we building next?

In my experience, it's a simple matter of it never being done, and people always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need

IMO that's the exact problem - you can't anticipate every need. You need to do user testing, iterate over UI layouts, etc. etc... by comparison, backend work is straightforward.

I think it's because it has historically been low-status work and stigma about working on the front-end persists. The majority of people I've worked with are eager to throw up their hands and commiserate with others about their lack of understanding about CSS (which, for some reason, indicates you are of higher status) rather than learning about how it works and doing a bit of memorization.

I personally have no problem doing front-end work when I have to and I think the fact that I don't drag my feet or complain about CSS has allowed me to learn it to a degree that has made it reasonable and quick to do.

Also most of the shitty parts of front-end development have been abstracted away with things like CSS vendor auto-prefixing and tools like ClojureScript and reagent. One of my favorite parts of the stack now, actually (when I can use those tools).

This isn't a web problem, this is a division of labor problem. There's plenty of specialization to be had to as you advance career wise, and by logical progression of the web platform. It sounds like you haven't found the right position fit, which isn't uncommon early in your career.

Totally comiserate with you. I'm not up on all of the latest frameworks but I hate not having a good compiler that catches syntax errors, typos, case mismatch, etc until runtime.

Right, but my question is more "what do you even mean when you say web?". For example, you could take a 'web' job and actually have nothing to do with frontend HTML/JS/CSS, and just be writing APIs.

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