Where are the places running their setup out of a rack in a rando datacenter grandfathered into an affordable Edgecast plan running a LAMP stack on Debian using borg for backups?
This may read like satire, but I promise I'm seriously asking.
Or am I just way too old?
Related: https://boringtechnology.club/
Just fair warning: you seem to be under the assumption that “boring” means “straightforward and just makes sense.” It does not. If you’re looking for that… good luck! Update if you find somewhere and I’ll join you.
I would recommend anybody this approach.
Rule of thumb for Germans, if they write a fax phone number on the imprint or the website looks 90s style... don't waste your time, skip them.
I went to visit out there and kinda dig the area.
If you happen to be looking for a DevOps or SRE role, check a large banks job boards, you'll be surprised how many open roles are available.
The point is - it's difficult to make generalizations about orgs that big.
Many use a lot of proprietary software, which can be a type of hell nobody understands till you end up as an expert in a niche area and spend your day dealing with vendors and tech support to fix anything. After 5 years you are an expert on "EnterpriseSoftwareCorpA On-Prem Elastic Scaling Stack and Integration to EnterpriseSoftwareCorpB On-Prem Data Stack" which nobody really sees as valuable, so you are now trapped in your career.
I know a bunch of people who wisely let go of 10+ years of their experience in some aging software so they could start again as an AWS solution architect. I'm sure it's was brutal doing that in their 40s/50s, with family, etc. It was tough, but 2 years later they are in a far better career position than those who are still praying for something to happen with those Enterprise stacks.
A lot of the hell that is enterprise software is how systems talk to each other. I'll give an example. Project is started to bring data from Vendor A Product into Product from Vendor B. Vendor A claims system is "open" but there is no documentation outside of some cryptic .NET examples. Even when a successful connection is made, the data and data model makes no sense and nearly impossible to map to what users see in UI.
Vendor A gets a call. Vendor A repeats "open" and brings an "SME" to explain data model. SME is really a Sales Engineer who concludes Vendor A has another product that will expose the data in usable way. Start evaluating this product, and it turns there is a lot overlap between features in Vendor A new product and Vendor B's product. Plus, you still need to use .NET and a proprietary connection to get data from A -> B. Plus,Vendor A's new product does data transformations in a black box..nobody knows what exactly.
Vendor A and B are pointing fingers and each trying to make a case for why their product needs to do X features. Nobody understands this .NET library, so a consulting company is used to build data pipeline from Vendor A -> B.
Granted, a lot of the above wouldn't be acceptable today and a lot of these types of systems are going away and being replaced by ones that are actually designed to be interoperable with other systems. This type of story is hopefully going away sooner than later.
I use a lot of proprietary systems in my current job at extra-big company, but at least they use stuff like SQL, RESTful APIs, etc. I can understand our Data and how it maps. Those are transferable skills.
I can only hope that FAANG isn't building systems where everything is proprietary and make no sense to anybody outside of the Eng team that built them.
I'm under the impression that gRPC is popular, and in some places GraphQL.
That being said, companies like GE, Siemens, and PTC are trying desperately to capture that space as well with their Saas/PaaS.. I won't say they are crap, but it's just more lock-in under the guide of "open." One of them has already gone the way of Watson.
YMML will vary in manufacturing. If you can jump to one of these companies that is on their journey from legacy systems to more open ones, you can definitely land in a good spot. Just ask the right questions when you interview there.
A lot of my Python expertise on Windows comes from working with that system. I used Python because 1) I already knew it, 2) I could easily run parts on either Windows or Linux and 3) all of the internal APIs I needed access to had Python wrappers available (or I could easily write one in Boost Python at the time). I forget exactly which Python libraries I used, but there was some Win32 COM going on, some ctypes and other Python based GUI automation, as well as a lot of process management (reports tended to hang quite a bit needing killing/restarting) and ETL work.
I spent roughly 7 of my 9 years at that company working in part on maintaining the integrations of that 3rd party system with our own internal systems. Yes, a significant chunk of my time at the company, but what software it was is just a footnote on my CV. Instead all of the interesting integration work I did and the efficiencies gained are elaborated upon (e.g. with 8 hours of development effort, I was able to automate away a previously 8-hour manual task that had to be done monthly).
And more of “places running near archaic .NET/JVM versions that somehow manage to combine bureaucracy with lack of organization”.
Majority of the services were older .NET framework projects with some other stuff scattered around. They had a sizable mainframe team, but we’re trying to migrate away from that platform.
I have a friend who works for a major low-code software company. They're doing quite well financially because of all the excitement around low-code. The product is good if you stay within the boundaries of what it can do. Some managers people think they can replace their enterprise Tableau/Spotfire/PowerBI license with low-code and they get bitten very badly.
Finding engineers for a low-code environment is a challenge. You need to understand software development well enough that you can build something because loops, conditional statements, all of those concepts are there. You also need to find somebody who is willing to possibly lock their career into a single tool and forgo the benefits of knowing a general purpose language like C#, Python, etc.
Some companies have success with finding technically minded business people or IT folks who don't enjoy coding and training them. They can thrive and build some nice apps. Lots of folks can't make the leap and fail. Software Engineers are probably the worst bunch to try an convince because the opportunity cost is too high.
Business / money making / crucial systems? No. Some random HR survey application? Maybe. Sadly Microsoft seems to have convinced a number of folks in our organization that this tool set is appropriate for all our development.
I'll second this. Strongly.
It is not so much boring as more of an amalgam of scar tissue and duct tape that accumulates over time and is a maintenance nightmare. You might run into the rare place that does things "right" with old technology but those are rare.
I do think some new things are "crazy" but I'll take "crazy new" before "crazy old" most days of the week.
but of course it also depends on how clever the people beforehand have been, is it stuff tied to impossible knots that cross over 5 parallel dimensions, where nobody knows what it does or how it's doing it, just that "it somehow works, so we don't touch it, that guy was a wizard", or is it just layers of faith held together with duct tape and rope, where people tried to fix stuff over years, throwing in patches that "probably should help, I think, maybe", which could be condensed into less than a third of the size, when rewritten...
I suspect that there's a fair amount of overlap—not total, but quite a bit—between companies that were doing old stuff The Right Way, with lots of well-considered automation and high-quality backups and well-documented, repeatable, largely scripted configuration, and companies that are on some of the "sexy" tech now. So it might be even harder than it used to be to find a company doing things the "boring" way but who don't have a horrible, barely-functioning mess on their hands.
I'd think some of the nerdier, niche tech places probably run things OK and not super new-school. Something like Rsync.net, maybe. Possibly places that like BSD in general will tend not to be on the new hotness. Difficulty: those sorts of places tend to have pretty low head counts so it may be hard to land a job at one (go figure, much of the tried and true stuff Just Works and doesn't require a ton of babysitting if you halfway know what you're doing)
Are there any examples of this? I’m coming up on 20 years into my career and i’ve genuinely never seen a large company that had their IT function ticking over sweetly. Every single one had aspirations and had some things nailed to a greater or lesser extent but none were “done”.
If anything, things are a LOT better today. The old mis-configured MS Exhange host hanging off the office DSL line is gone these days. The MD / CEO’s password is unlikely to be Password1 nowadays.
Well, yeah. It’s been 10 years, and we need to change the password every 3 months, also, you told me not to use ‘Password’, so the password is now ‘CompanyName40’
I've seen a lot of modern tech from other large companies too (banks, retailers etc.) - the culture and pace of development might be different but their tech stacks are very up to date. Even if some of those companies have an old mainframe still running somewhere, they have tonnes of other software too, most of it much more up to date.
If only it were so... A lot of teams in these companies are heavily into fad-chasing, so your random internal web app that has 1 user per hour will be deployed in fully-scalable manner on the company's k8s cluster (which is shit, because company didn't put nearly enough people into keeping it running).
And I think companies 500-1000 of the Fortune 1000 would be even more interesting to work for.
I don't know how old you are, but now that I have running water I think to my old and boring setup I cringe at how much work it was to replace or add to an existing cluster, or to replicate it for testing out new features. How out of date the software was, and how easy it would be for an APT to exploit some known-for-years vulnerability in a transitive software dependency.
I wish I could afford an SRE in my current startup, but the fact that we can run a decently reliable setup that's easy to keep up to date, expand and modify is thanks to all of that web scale technology trickling down to us small fish.
And why not use borg for backups? We still do run Debian (or Ubuntu, but same diff), if it's good it's good.
DevOps, DevSecOps, Kubernetes, SRE's, they're all buzzwords because they're powerful ideas that will enable you to run a modern IT company effectively. Whether that company is web scale 100% YoY growth, or "simple" manufacturing automation. If you're going in comparing it to terraforming mars, then you're not opening your mind to what's possible on earth with a little bit of learning new stuff.
I really like your running water analogy.
Newer technology is usually easier. Especially if you pick the easy stuff.
I used to do all these tricks to work infra jobs but not be on call. Now - is it in AWS? Is the app in a container? Is it deployed with Kubernetes? Then I don't even care if there is on call!
I've woken up to fix Linux servers in the middle of the night dozens of times. And don't get me wrong - I love Linux. I have yet to have my first "kubernetes broke during the middle of the night" call.
Not to say that new tech doesn't have tradeoffs too. But good lord! It's so much harder with old tech. It's like you're purposely doing it harder to prove a point.
Sounds like you just have worked at places who sucked at updating, maintaining, and setting up their own hardware unfortunately. Which I agree can be a huge pain in the ass if done incorrectly.
Jup I've only worked at startups the past decade and never had a mature system administration team so yeah learning the ropes was rough.
Also my grandma used to have gas lighting and wells. That was fun, but I can't go back to that.
I think people just don't like the uncertainty with new tech, but the old ones can be uncertain too.
EDIT: I was considering doing this myself recently, so maybe you'll like the idea, too: Just walk physically to all the mom&dad shops in your area and ask them if they want a free website, if they allow you to put Google text ads on the side. If you have time, you can build those websites and super cheaply host them themselves, and it'll certainly help those shops get their feet wet in the digital age. Plus you build up some ad/link inventory which you can monetize later. The reason why I considered doing it is because I'm 100% sure that people will tell you a lot of technical stuff that they need solved, if you're there and willing to listen. And those small shops are going to need small cloud-free solutions.
Where is this true? I'd say this ecosystem is more dependent upon Docker Hub et al.
Just to clarify: Docker isn’t a dependency management solution, but for most people it’s an important part of the solution.
I loved helping those small businesses but a lot of them don't have a lot of money to burn so going with a monthly rate they can plan on is powerful, as is managing expectations. A lot wanted Facebook for $500. There are patterns that emerge and one could build an in house stack to handle most everything I'm sure, just increase your monthly as they add services.
Mind explaining what this means? Did they want content generation for posts? Or did they actually just want someone to post what they had on file? Or did they just want advertising help?
My family has small businesses and I've thought about helping others, but the asks seem too all over the place.
> Mind explaining what this means?
As a freelancer, what I’ve seen is requests for building a Facebook-scale social network with all the scalable infrastructure and other bells and whistles, mobile app integration, etc., sometimes for a specific community (lawyers, doctors, or some such), that offer $500 as total budget.
I've lost count of the number of customers who said "this should be easy, I'm sure you can knock it up in an afternoon" whilst I'm thinking there is probably two years work in what you are asking for.
Other times, yeah, they want some crazy machine learning driven whatever with bells and whistles and social and apps on every major platform and blah blah blah and don't get why that will take at a bare minimum dozens of very talented and expensive people, and probably multiple years, to achieve. Which is the "Facebook for $500" thing.
Maybe you should consider Perl? I'm only half joking. I have a few Perl projects running unchanged for 15 years and hopefully for the next 15 years as well.
Plus I still use one service in production which was written in C++ in 2009. It's statically linked and as such the binary survived 3 major OS upgrades unmodified. Around 2015 I put it behind Nginx just to be sure with all the OpenSSL issues being discovered. It was designed to be multi-threaded to fully take advantage of a dual-core Athlon with 2GB RAM. Oh wow is that one blazing fast on today's hardware.
If you built an app targeting Ruby 1.8.7 (~15 yrs old now?) with maybe rack and sinatra as your only dependencies using only the bare feature set that was available then, it would easily run on Ruby 3 with no code modifications. It would be a lot nicer than Perl too I bet.
If you rely on industry standard software libraries however, you have to keep in mind that keeping up with the industry standard is in the bargain.
OTOH, if the culture of a language is that mature, popular libraries tend not to receive breaking changes, even if the principal maintainer reads a blog post and falls in love with New Paradigm X, maintenance can be much cheaper/easier, while still using plenty of 3rd party libraries.
Boring, however, is contextual. We have flex hours. We have unlimited PTO (and frequent reminders to take personal time - I already know the data related to offering unlim PTO and how often people then take PTO, thank you very much). We make over $1 million in revenue a year with 6 people and no plans to have exponential growth, coupled with high margins so that we aren't rugpulled by a rainy day (and to take appropriate profits of course). My employees report high levels of job satisfaction and happiness.
Our focus? Maintaining boring legacy software for low-risk clients. We also do some greenfield work, but we like the stability that comes with working on older cash cow software.
The jobs are out there. We're just not super flashy about it.
EDIT: I appreciate everyone who commented :) if this wasn't a burner I'd totally reach out to some of you!
Those relationships were invaluable. The speaking/articles got me into professional networks that then got me referrals. I kept up with former peers enough such that I was able to get both business and employees from them.
I have done zero advertising and have projected $1.5-2 million in revenue this year. Most of that is profit. I'll personally have a net income of over $1 million this year... and at this point I'm spending a good portion of the day playing FPS. ;)
Boring is the new sexy.
And the best part - we're often able to integrate new technologies into older, legacy systems gradually, which is fun for devs and risky-yet-risk-adverse enough for stakeholders. Win-win!
More correctly: I state that I do not have a time-off policy. This is mainly to prevent administrative overhead - something that a minimum number of days would require. I know this won't scale, so I imagine we'll have a "formalized" vacation process long term, but I'm not there yet and don't plan on being there for at least 2-3 more employees.
Illustrating the "no cultural block" point: I had an employee tell me on a Wednesday that he needed the week off the next week to unwind for mental health reasons. I moved a few things around with customers and he happily enjoyed the week. That is signal enough to me that my employees feel fine asking for time off.
It sounds good on paper, but it benefits the company, not you.
EDIT: my employees work across 4 states.
Some value a high-stress, cutting-edge environment. I don't and my employees largely don't either. Boring == predictable to us.
We are definitely not "move fast and break things" like NPM is. We move appropriately fast while de-risking our customers long-term.
My suggestion: figure out what kind of boring/not boring you like, and find a job that shares those values.
Back in the day when we had to hire a guy to go down to the cage every day to repair yet another faulty machine, we would have given our left arm for the ability to magically spin up a new VM of any size with a baked image by just running an API call. It's freakin' magic.
I also love, love, love plain Fargate. Not as stupidly complicated as K8s, but I can still run containers without ever thinking about managing hosts. Just keep my containers up to date, push new ones, and trigger a deploy. Never have to "upgrade my cluster to keep from using EOL versions" or "migrate ingress to a new API version" or some other ridiculous thing. It just works, and all I have to think about is my app/container.
I miss it not one jot.
They lost about 50k in sales that day, still less than the cost-of-ownership for redundancy.
PS. Please keep conversations civil. You probably don’t know me, but I’m the least “scared of failure” person you’ll ever meet.
Same goes for the HashiStack. I really don't want to work with Kubernetes anymore simply to deploy some containers.
I'll be moving back to Europe this year, and I find your comment quite funny, given that I am moving to a city with significantly cheaper housing and better weather than where I live now (NYC).
QoL is not only measured in "dollars of income".
Housing isn't more expensive baring maybe the city centers of huge cities like Paris and London. But housing is much more evenly spread and better connected with transit, so you don't jump from uber expensive dense city core to very far away low density suburbs. Savings from healthcare and transportation, plus pensions, offset the taxes, mostly.
They also pay much lower than even enterprise webshit, despite requiring increasingly more specialized knowledge.
I suspect this where the real "expertise" in Building Software Systems lies. Stable, Steady, Fault-Tolerant, least MTBF etc. characteristics are the name of the Game.
We did have a brief stint with AWS, but that's thankfully over, partly because their Aurora Postgres-like cloud thing regularly would thrash to death because it doesn't have anywhere to store temporary data so a biggish join means out of memory, partly because the US law that says foreigners have no right to privacy from NSA with judicial review makes it illegal in Europe to use US providers unless data is encrypted client-side (see Schrems II).
I wish someone would start a sysadm contractor company offering setting up and maintaining servers at something like Hetzner. Take a service fee for being ready to respond to emergencies, bill for hours spent, and let Hetzner bill the hardware. Setting up a server isn't that bad, you can do that with a script, but ongoing maintenance and having someone always ready to respond to emergencies (that never occur, almost) is something you wouldn't mind having a competent sysadm take care of, as a developer.
I think there's a huge market for this in Europe with Schrems II, for those that aren't really deeply dependent on the software stack in cloud services. And you can get some beefy machines at Hetzner for pennies compared to Amazon or Google.
The job ads that catch your eye are specifically tailored for those results. They're usually posted from flashy startups who are high on their own supply. I had many an interview with those types of places, and nothing you could say would be good enough for them. That's why those job posting are always open.
What worked for me was happenstance -- I applied to a job that was posted by a recruiter, and once I was in that recruiting company's ecosystem, they started passing opportunities my way. The opportunities were interesting and had "boring" and relatable tech. If I looked up the job ads for those opportunities, the posting itself sucked and lacked the detail I'd expect. I'd have never applied without a recruiter talking to me about it.
There is a massive demand for developers at small and medium sized businesses. Those businesses have no idea how to effectively market their postings, which is why they use recruiters. The startups that know how to effectively market their postings on WeWorkRemotely and such have the applicant pool to be insanely choosy. If you're having trouble landing something, apply to jobs that are close to what you're looking for, but definitely posted by a recruiter. The recruiters will talk to you, and if they like what they hear, the interviews will pour in.
Because the problem domain of banking sucks so much, the tooling is necessarily simple and "unsexy". We like things that fit into a single VM/folder and can be built in 1 click. Anything more complex than this is almost certainly going to fail by default under the combined weight of unnecessary technical complexity and vast (and necessary) business requirements.
It took us until the 3rd year of integration with one of our banking customers before someone in IT even gave enough of a shit to naturally ask the question "so what language/framework/technique did you write <product name> in?" Obviously, we are required to disclose this in legal materials prior to implementing our product, but our customer sees "Microsoft" and rubber-stamps it without much drama. No one else gives a shit about the tech after this phase of the project (which lasts approximately 1 phone call).
I assume it's mostly because not many decent software developers want to suffer Banking's work environment
Anyway, the group I worked in was an acquisition with a completely different tech stack. So we were basically completely ignored except for the occasional saber rattling that we should be moving to blessed tech stack. After which we would say, sure give us a project with time and budget reserved and we'll get right on that. Cue the crickets. Also, my group was PCI burdened, so we quickly became exempt from any of the afore-mentioned cloud stuff, because they were afraid we would make the cloud in scope for PCI.
Now, most of the people who I knew were decent have left. But it wasn't about the technology -- the paycheck is enough to get through that. It's mostly around back-to-office mandates. Which is a strange stance, after the company spent who-knows-how-much moving all our machines to be virtual desktops that we could log into from anywhere.
The salaries don't suggest that, unless I'm at the wrong locations and/or looking at the wrong banks.
After 12 years of growth we are still happily on:
- 1 Ubuntu server
- 1 MySQL db
- 1 Django framework
- Ansible for deployment
Some years back I had a chance to talk with the CTO of a company very similar to ours, and their landscape was 400+ microservices, 50 servers managed by k8s on Azure Cloud, Service bridges, Workflow engines, 5 different DB engines, etc. It sounded very fascinating, but also quite complicated.
Some of my worst decisions over the years has been not having the balls to say no to current best-practices. I've learned the hard way that even though the pressure of using shining-new-thingTM can be immense it's so important to realise that everything always has pros and cons. The most important thing is trying to really understand _my_ specific problem and _then_ using the simplest and most obvious solution that can work.
Obligatory "Programmers are also human" link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk
I'm going to say, on a random job board, this is actually the vast minority of jobs. Most, even at FAANG, have lots of unsexy maintenance that just needs to get done. Even in fancy machine learning land (where I work) 99% of the work is fairly 'boring' in the traditional sense.
Also, there is a strong bias to talk about 'sexy' work outside the company. For a variety of dev marketing reasons. Nobody does a conference talk about the uninteresting boring work that gets done.
Id go to that
I learned that the job really should’ve been called “Data Janitor”. 90-95% if the work was cleaning data sets and making sure that last update in some ML library we used didn’t mess up something.
There’s a ton of business that simply need basic websites and those still need to be developed by someone.
Most businesses don’t need anything complex. It’s just basic sites and emails.
Keeps me busy, and automating as much as I can, before I ride off into the sunset. Sometimes the shiny ring isn't what you need to chase.
At all of these companies you will be forced to use Internet Explorer 11 and you'll program in a remote desktop Notepad.exe on Windows Server 2012. Doing anything else is explicitly banned. The programming language is a proprietary version of Visual Basic with all the functions renamed and changed slightly so the vendor can control access to the $5k/year documentation, which is still horribly written. You will sign an agreement not to ever ask or answer questions about the language on Stack Overflow too. The vendor of these languages doesn't really exist beyond an email address like "sales@enterprisereadypython.com" - they will gaslight you that this is the real Python and python.org is a scam, "if you're not paying you're the product!". None of your coworkers will know what you're talking about when you mention Git or Linux.
Open source is as capitalist as it gets for the most part IMO. Public Github = company flexing or CV. Either way….
I did startups for 10 years prior. Never ending rat races, constant high pressure deadlines, everything is "ASAP", compensation is iffy (your start ups got to make it).
In contrast, I work for a bank now. Easiest and most well compensated job I have ever had in my life. So easy that I am pursuing additional degrees (which they pay for), and moonlighting my own product offerings, virtually stress free.
They still dabble in some of the tech you mention. But they are much more deliberate about everything. And if they do go with something, it will be around for a long time.
It can be frustrating working in companies that treat IT as a cost center, but there's still a lot of money to be made there. (And as a bonus, the interviews are ridiculously low-pressure compared to Google.)
So unless the company is extremely young (say younger than 10 years) then there will be tech of all ages and all levels of sexy.
We also deploy with Chef and an in-house application deployment system written in Perl, do monitoring with mon, and understand that a sysadmin is a subject matter expert.
Hiring, too.
This. There are thousands of great "Tier 3" (not FAANG, not Fortune 500, but still large) companies out there in the US that will pay $100k-$200k with great benefits, 9-5 culture, and good job security. The SV startup world is pretty irrelevant at this point with the shift to remote IMO.
In my experience only owners who had enough momentum from previous businesses with that setup or who just maintained a fairly small pool of revenue (and so didn't change.)
Also the economy went through a lot of M&A because its hard in the middle, failures are catastrophic, and paying some guy who will probably take you to beer lunches to host your stuff makes you look smart to all the other up and coming CEOs.
For historical reasons, this is also heavily tied to the adoption of EDI. So I'd start looking for boring tech stacks in areas that have EDI documents associated with them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List
And then you pick local smaller companies and then you have you what you look for.
You don't sound too old but maybe stuck on the past a bit? Nothing boring about a LAMPP stack but there are better ways of doing that, the tool for the job and all.
Nothing makes me want to leave this industry more than having to plan evenings and weekends around on-call shifts I didn't volunteer for and get shuffled around less than a month in advance. My expertise is all distributed systems and database engines =\
We have a friend who’s totally nuts. He thinks about work 24.7.365 because he’s always on call. When we go on hikes he has his laptop in his backpack “in case they page me”…
And hilariously I enjoy the fire-fighting and deep root-causing under pressure. But 99% of it is waking up in the middle of the night for a faulty alarm.
What is off putting is all this hyper growth series F funding impending exit nonsense.
An independent and profitable company that wants to sray below 50 or so people sounds like a dream to me.
It's just that lots of people like living in/near the most expensive cities in the US so you don't see these companies as much.
I work at Home Chef. We got acquired by Kroger in 2018. It's pretty chill. They don't pay what FANG+ does but its a nice tech stack, lower stress environment, and the workforce is really diverse. The Kroger corporate overlords pretty much leave us alone which is great.
Generally mid market companies like this are a little bit more relaxed. Large enough to have some structure and orgs in place while still small enough to do some interesting work without too much bullshit to wade through.
Partly sarcastic rewording: in other words, do you have to track CVEs, updated / broken dependencies, zero-days, encrypt at rest, scale, linguistics, support quick turnaround / Agile, work with people that expect Javascript/Typescript, work with tooling that must run on latest Java or recent C libs, work with managers that think DDD must be followed, etc etc? Sure partly this is just software industry in general, but so many areas of concern balloon when coding for the web.
- Essay: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-so...
- Book if you dig it! https://www.audible.com/pd/Shop-Class-as-Soulcraft-Audiobook...
I briefly worked for an agency early in my career where most of the clients had WordPress or Magento sites with low to moderate traffic. They would usually only need a few hours a month each, so it wouldn't have made sense for them to hire full time programmers or sysadmins.
I've done both, modern companies make it easy to get things done. Legacy companies are frustrating hellholes.
But bear in mind, there's a big chance you'll be in a vendor lock-in, with little flexibility to work outside of those tools - at least for the larger organizations.
And here, from the title, I was going to advise you to go to Mike Rowe's website, and learn to be a heavy equipment operator, or carpenter, or something.
E.g. years ago a company might have run their own LAMP stack to host a website or a small online store or whatever.
But in this age of SaaS it is easier for these smaller shops to just use something like Wix or Shopify to handle it for them, complete with fancy wysiwyg editors etc.
I used to get requests to "add payments" or something to websites I used to help out with so that they could basically do an online shop. At the time I actively rejected those requests as there were huge headaches around things like PCI compliance and the like. Fast forward a decade or more and with GDPR and Cookie laws etc it is a total non-brainer to use a hosted service where they handle all of this, rather than spin up your own ecommerce solution.
It does not make sense to roll your own unless you have a large engineering team, at which point you move beyond some random thing running in some random data center somewhere.
Of course not everything online is ecommerce or CMS-oriented - there will be niche and custom stuff that is not handled well by SaaS offerings.
1. Banking or insurance. Both industries provide high-paying, great-benefits, low-stress jobs (assuming you're OK with bureaucracy or can ignore it) using anything from ancient technology to modern k8s. Here are some anecdotes:
a. Friend works at a small regional bank with ~150b in assets. Their job is to maintain (amongst other less important ones) a classic ASP application which generates monthly compliance reports that get submitted to the fed. Critical work but trivially easy (if you know classic ASP!). The software runs on a single potato VM; development is done on a clone potato VM. They don't even use version control for this as it has been pending approval for 3 years... For this, they make $150k + 15% 401k match + unlimited PTO (forced 2 weeks per quarter off). Rent in that area is ~800/mo for a 2bdr.
b. College acquaintance does boring ASP.NET WebForms development for a regional insurance carrier. They cover 7 counties out of 30ish in said state. They maintain the member portal for all insured members, which runs in their local datacenter with failover a few states away. Captive audience, known size, no need for fancy scaling or load balancing as they have one active season (open enrollment), easy to prepare for. They plan on migrating from WebForms to .NET Core MVC possibly in the next 5 years. No need to rush, though! Same as above; six figure, good match, lots of PTO, similar rent.
c. Insurance for a major carrier, remote. Think Excellus/Aetna/etc. Boring ASP.NET MVC development with jQuery. The engineer has no idea what hardware they run, as despite working on production features, they never deploy any actual code - that happens 15 management levels up the chain. Said engineer has heard that, if they want a test environment, it is requested through IT and provisioned via VMWare, but has no idea if that is what production runs on. Much higher compensation than the previous two.
2. SMB consulting. SMB accounts for what, 95%+ of businesses in the US? Hit up any city anywhere and you will find 50-100 small IT/software consulting companies. There is plenty of the pie to go around if you aren't looking for exit numbers. These companies tackle everything. Custom AS400 solutions? Sure why not. Software written on a version of PHP so low you can count it on your coccyx? Sure, we migrate that. Mission critical software running on Bob's Laptop but Bob retired and nobody has his password and now the entire line is shut down until we can find a fix? Yeah, we can fix that. SMB consulting is really where it's at if you want wonky, boring stuff.
3. Education of the higher (college) variety. I did a stint at my uni for ~5 years and they are the very definition of boring. "Cutting edge" for a uni is paying Oracle a few million bucks for an SIS system that somehow runs slower than their custom built AS400 implementation that Frank from IT wrote himself 25 years ago. If you're somewhere modern, you might have some sort of VM infrastructure somewhere, but you'll be caught up in budgeting for at least a year trying to figure out what code to bill that shit to. In that time you'll find another department tossing out an old Itanium with 16GB of RAM that will absolutely just barely run your critical Spring 1.0 application tossed together by some students who haven't quite got to a web engineering course yet.
The biggest way to find these is networking. I have not had a proper interview in 25 years - every single job has been a referral over a coffee or beer that starts with, "So I've got this job, it's a little weird, but hear me out..."
On LinkedIn.
This is the best answer that you will get.