Working as a web developer is making me hate programming
23 10 May 2017 00:04 by u/VitamenGSpot
It's like being an artist but all you are allowed to paint is the same bowl of fruit after someone stencils in the outline and the person who filled out your pallet didn't give you the right colors so you have to do your best and of course it's not pretty but you did the best possible job with what you had and that the end product sucks is somehow your fault.
15 comments
25 u/Kromulent 10 May 2017 00:19
Welcome to the dirty secret of the professional programing world. Doing it fast, with half-assed tools and stupid, every-changing constraints is not a thing that gets in the way of the job, it is the job.
Doing it right, the way that you know is best, is a hobby.
If it makes you feel any better, pretty much every job is like this.
Embrace the suck. You got good at doing things right, now get good at doing it fast, with shit tools, and in a way that makes the guy with the cash in his hand happy. Be one of those scrappy dudes that can fix anything with a hairpin and piece of string. That's rewarding in its own way too.
8 u/cameronbabiak 10 May 2017 00:34
Agreed. I stopped taking contracts for websites, and push people to the self serve site builders because I hate all the stress from working on shit.
half the time all a client needs is consulting on how to effectively market on social media and to add Thier business to Google maps.
I focus on web applications now - pure coding only.
6 u/tame 10 May 2017 04:05
"Hi, I'm an artist!"
"Oh, you're good at painting? Here's a roller, paint that wall."
- 99% of commercial software development.
2 u/B166-ER 10 May 2017 19:51
More like...
"We're currently seeking a fresh young energetic programmer to crush this new project and launch their career!"
"Hi, I'm an artist with my code and can unfuck your worst with one hand"
"Oh, you're an artistic, goal-oriented, problem solver. Here's a roller, start painting. We'll tell you once we start paying... we were told artists work best when they're starving."
1 u/tame 10 May 2017 22:36
Off on a tangent now, but your post reminded me... one thing that absolutely pisses me off is when non-technical people say shit like "you're technical, not artistic". Like, fuck you buddy my work is art, it just also happens to actually solve a problem instead of just being a waste of glue and macaroni like yours.
5 u/Norm 10 May 2017 00:34
Yup there's a reason I never applied for a job like that
3 u/iamrage 10 May 2017 02:25
I've felt the same till I realised that badly designed websites keep the customers coming back for do-overs which means more money. It also means they listen to me a lot more when I say something a designer has designed may look pretty, but usability wise it's a steaming pile of shit. On average, the customer would roll in to get a 3-5k website done and then spend the same amount (or more) in improvements.
If you want it done right the way you know it should be done, then get people with good UI/UX experience.
2 u/tehpatriarchy 10 May 2017 09:43
Yes web dev is like training as an electronic engineer and designing traffic light relays. When you thought you would be designing quantum computers or some such.
1 u/Wowbagger 10 May 2017 13:58
here's a little sympathetic catharsis
1 u/kevf4 10 May 2017 19:38
Oh you like angular 1? Well angular 2 is the future! Google announces angular 4
They aren't really adding anything these days. Just moving things around.
2 u/B166-ER 10 May 2017 19:57
This is pretty much what all software starts to don once you get to a certain level... they move shit around to confuse your users and keep moving that compatibility list around so you have to keep upgrading and reintegrating.
"Didn't we just finish the back-end overhaul last month?"
"Yep, well [vendor] pushed an update which borks systems running on X.XX so now we have to do it all over again for the update"
"What the hell does this update accomplish?"
"It moves the user settings menu into a sub menu of the system settings. And there's a new logo on the splash page."
0 u/VitamenGSpot [OP] 12 May 2017 02:55
That statement is the thesis for my new book "Everything wrong with modern web development".
1 u/F0rmshifter 10 May 2017 20:35
Welcome to modern society. Youre just a number and a drone.
1 u/prairie 10 May 2017 21:53
You want to enjoy it? Pull out an old system where you just had the CPU and some RAM, and program in assembly language (machine is too cruel). There is nothing except you and the hardware, no social/historical baggage (aside from the instruction set) bogging you down. Old game consoles from the 1980s are pretty good for this, and have some graphical output. Newer, the AVR microcontrollers are pretty clean and you can work on the bare metal as well.