The future for a non web developer - brutal honesty

Solarion said:
What you have described is spot on with my type of development. I love doing all the back end coding, all the database operations, the coding etc. The front end is ACTUALLY for me right now where I am at a bit of a quandry, the actual UI stuff.
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Somehow I forgot to respond to this. I would advise you to think about what you enjoy doing. If you don't like front end, don't do it. You'll be happier. Seek jobs where there is more back end work. I will say that those kinds of jobs are rare in South Africa. In South Africa, everybody does a bit of everything, and you are expected to be a full stack developer. I don't like that personally, because I don't like front end. My current job has no front end. We don't even develop one. Your interact with our application via console or remote procedure call, that's it.

bchip said:
8.
If you work in IT, you need an exit strategy. Your goal should be to get to management as soon as possible. There is no upward potential in being an individual contributor, the pace of change is vicious and unrelentingly, and inevitably you will not be able to keep up. Do you see a lot of senior IT talent in their 50’s and 60’s? Nope.
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As cguy said, relevant to South Africa because South Africa is a little backwards. One of our group leads doesn't like managing people. Doesn't want to be a line manager. Despite that, he is extremely senior at the company, and I would guess his pay is in the millions of Rands per year (if converted). This is because his technical skill means that he isn't replaceable, and while he doesn't manage people, he provides technical leadership to what we do. The company realised that they need to keep him around. So he is in a leadership position but not a management position, and extremely well remunerated for that.

9. If you want to make real money, you need to be managing people.
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To a certain extent this is true, but there are exceptions. One is the really mathematical backend programming that some people do. The people that work for hedge funds etc. Hedge funds will pay top dollar to people who make financial decisions that make them money, or, people who implement algorithms that make them money. Management? No, I don't think they care. Its related to the point below actually. If you work in development at a hedge fund, you are the person that generates sales. Therefore, they pay you well.

10. Everything is Sales. If you are not directly tied to generating income, you’re seen as an expense. That’s bad for business and bad for your career. Income generators keep their jobs. Expenses get reorganized or cut.
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The way I see it, you should be close to the coal face. I don't know why I started calling it the coal face, but I do. If you are close to revenue generating activity for a company, you will be paid well. An example would be working at a software development company that makes and sells software. Their bread and butter depends on there being software to sell, so they have to pay developers well. However, if you work at a bank for example, they see you as a cost centre. Unless IT is a significant part of the bank's strategy, they won't pay you well and you won't get much in the way of advancement. Its a well known problem in UK investment banks, that they struggle to attract the best software developers because they don't treat them well.

Stay Out of the Huddle. Every office has a group of people who congregate at the water cooler, break room or cafeteria. The sole purpose of these groups is to commiserate and brew negativity.
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I'd agree with this one but make it a little more specific. Joining huddles is fine, it depends on what you talk about. If you talk about office politics, that just breeds negativity. Your own perception becomes more negative even if the company itself isn't that bad. For your own sake, don't gossip about negative stuff at your company. You don't help and just make it worse.

In general I'd agree with a lot of that list though.
 
Solarion said:
You think it's possible to keep going for the next 20 years without becoming a web developer. I look at my skill set which is mostly winforms in C# and I feel like I'm being left behind. Where do I go from here?
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Can't you volunteer to rewrite the winform to web, everything I've worked on as a desktop application had reason to be converted to web.
 
stoymigo said:
Can't you volunteer to rewrite the winform to web, everything I've worked on as a desktop application had reason to be converted to web.
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Language frameworks make the distinction between web and desktop applications murky. You can write desktop and web applications with Python. Java has frameworks like Spring which makes it easy for a non web developer to create “web” applications. Another example is the gosu extension to Java which is used in the insurance industry. Corporate systems use these, which enables them to use their existence developer resources without too much trouble. I’m sure there are others.

Having said that, I have found that there is still a distinction. We have a “portals” team who use JavaScript to build the customer front end. This ui still uses the same business logic in the Java application which also used by call Center agents who have different application front end.

This enables us to keep a single underwriting engine while allowing the flexibility of keeping customer experience fresh and modern. There is still a need to keep the customer journey separate from the call Center agents journey.

Btw, our portals team only has 4 developers out of a team of approx 35.

The problem with “web developers” is that there are too many of them. The future for non-web developers remain positive as long are willing to not just learn new technologies, but pick the right ones.
 
I was forced into this. The thing is, the way these web frameworks operate goes against the grain of my design mindset.
But anyway, I did it.
My stuff is Golang underneath the skin.
 
Daruk said:
Definitely go web. MVC preferably. Don't let the plethora of options stop you. Pick one pop framework and stick with it... Preferably an emerging framework.
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For java back-end and if u interested in python, js, spring stuff.. skies the limit it seems. I'm actually excited that I'm doing my own thing on the side even with the coming collapse of rand. Only tricky thing is moving to company that does some parts of it as companies and personalities in industry love being gatekeepers and pretend its all so hard.

Reality check.. modern frameworks are easier and a lot more documented.. so if u started dev in the 90s or 00s .. i look at whats around me these days and it's funny as hell that people pretend their framework is special. it's not.. what is though is learning how to pull them together to make something production ready and even then.. once u know ..
 
bchip said:
8.
If you work in IT, you need an exit strategy. Your goal should be to get to management as soon as possible. There is no upward potential in being an individual contributor, the pace of change is vicious and unrelentingly, and inevitably you will not be able to keep up. Do you see a lot of senior IT talent in their 50’s and 60’s? Nope.
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There's an interesting counterpoint to this.

The reason you don't see a lot of senior IT talent over 50 is not necessarily because they can't cut it or are obsolete. They are extremely rare for another reason.

The world population of programmers doubles every 5 years. It is estimated conservatively that there are about 20 million programmers in the world right now. That means that there were roughly 150 000 programmers about 30 years ago. Of that, probably way more than half moved to management or other careers. But even if half are still around that means that 75 000 out of 20 000 000 would be over 50, i.e. 0.3%.

I highly recommend this:

 
software development is software development.

the code is the easy part anyway
 
Geez you guys make this complicated and theoretical/philosophical.
 
ArtyLoop said:
I was forced into this. The thing is, the way these web frameworks operate goes against the grain of my design mindset.
But anyway, I did it.
My stuff is Golang underneath the skin.
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Once you take in the following realisation, the motivation behind frameworks start making a lot of sense.

Websites are nothing but a fancy interface for a database.

Once you adopt that mindset, you will see that there are common tasks that you will have to repeat. Which is why frameworks are critical because the problems encountered in this task will be common to almost every website. The only sites that this mindset doesn't apply to are your static sites. And those have been automated to the point of perfection with stuff like hugo.
 
konfab said:
Once you take in the following realisation, the motivation behind frameworks start making a lot of sense.

Websites are nothing but a fancy interface for a database.

Once you adopt that mindset, you will see that there are common tasks that you will have to repeat. Which is why frameworks are critical because the problems encountered in this task will be common to almost every website. The only sites that this mindset doesn't apply to are your static sites. And those have been automated to the point of perfection with stuff like hugo.
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Pretty much, except we made the web page a fancy interface to underlying hardware
 
Tbh, does it matter if it's a web end front-end? I find it's a lot faster/easier to build a web front-end, mostly because it's pretty easy to build responsive sites nowadays.
And what's the worry about it being web vs winforms, it's all just a different tool to do the same thing, most of the logic doesn't really change.
 
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