Hacker News Reader

Comment by henriquez | Hacker News Reader

You’re not wrong. I just quit the industry as well; the multiple levels of webpacked transpiled bullshit, react modules for spacer divs and “type safe CSS” really got me down. Between ass backwards code, renting mainframes from Amazon, and surveillance capitalism I realized that everything I loved about commercial web engineering has gone to shit.

I have no idea what my next move is but right now I don’t really care.

View on HN

Go work on embedded stuff. There are lots of jobs where you work primarily with electrical engineers. It is pretty much the opposite of front end work.

Embedded work has its good points, but it has its downsides. I wouldn’t advise anyone to change because they expected the tooling or libraries to be better designed, or if they imagined that working with electronics means dealing with less bugs or that they might be working with more skilled people!

I have relevant background to say this, although my embedded work is very rusty. I have an EE degree and a small amount of experience with electronics. I’ve been doing web front end for over a decade which was mostly 100% JavaScript SPA dev work (recently quit because browsers are hell: I did like the money and some of the challenges!).

Yeah, I certainly didn't mean to imply that embedded code is high quality. It is just as much of a mixed bag as anything else. If anything it can be a bit worse because it often isn't user facing. Also, as an embedded developer, a big part of your job is to wallpaper over bugs in hardware.

Embedded is a pretty stable ecosystem though. Most of the "new" stuff is introduced on the order of years.

Embedded sounds cool but I like working with vanilla JS and high performance in-browser rendering with canvases and other tricks. Basically the opposite of modern JS frameworks. I might brush up on my linear algebra and get into Vulkan programming. I’m basically unemployable right now due to severe lockdown-induced burnout so I have time to figure stuff out.

Oh man, try WebGL if you haven't already. If you're into math and writing highly-performant code, shaders/GLSL is going to be right up your alley. And you can make really cool and fun stuff with it in the frontend, too!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGL_API

Reply on news.ycombinator.com