FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.
That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big data together or generating reports, will we need a typical backend engineer ever again? How complex are schemas ever going to get that a UI can’t do it (and generate the corresponding api)?
It happened to the first version of the frontend developer and I think backend is next. Then frontend again at some point, and Data people have another thing coming when the backend folks need to find another job when theirs goes away.
If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.
They have business logic specific to our product, and owned by the company, so although I'm doing a lot of pointless "plug together HTML" work for my learning, I'm also doing stuff that, AFAICT, has to be original code written by me.
Did I manage to successfully duck out the entire web trend already? When I was a kid, the web barely worked. When I was in college, web apps were a strange novelty Google was working on. When I started my career as a developer, I heard murmurs that web was the only kind of developer left. 10 years on, I'm still working steady and still not a web / mobile dev. I learned a little TS and started using Rust for backends, and that's about it. I knew SQL from college. The web trend came and went and I only learned how HTTP works in the last 5 years. Doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world.
Is it just a combo of luck and privilege that I missed it?
> If tech is going to replace industries, it’s going to start with replacing parts of itself first. We’ll be the first to know how this is going to go down.
Probably. At first it was funny - Software was a coal vein that just kept going deeper and deeper the more we dug, and high-level languages kept lowering the barriers to entry, making more programmers who each made more money.
Some day the vein's either got to run out, or widen so much that everyone is a programmer getting paid nothing. Since I have enough money to save, I'm hoping to retire before the sigmoid inflects fully.
If businesses didn’t start moving their apps off Desktop and into the browser, what the hell were we all going to do? We’d have to goto the Java bootcamps, instead of the web app ones.
Pay attention because I don’t think business wants a fancy new UI and backend every few years (especially in the Enterprise space). I think we’re going to be done with this too.
They will one day just load all that crap into Airtable and standardize business tools industry wide.
The command line can be daunting until you play with it a bit and I know many web devs try to avoid it as much as possible while working.
And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.
We have a precedent for dealing with government intervention in established industries which usually involves providing support to transition to other industries. Fisheries management is full of examples of government paying fishermen to fish less for example. Yet somehow coal miners became a target of derision by a certain branch of American politicians who gleefully cackled about regulating them out of work.
Devs have been so resilient because learning new things has been a part of the job description for decades.