Comment by aalleavitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aalleavitch | Hacker News Reader

I work for an ecommerce company that’s just small enough that as a front end dev I wear a really big stack of hats. I regularly have to reach across .net MVC, React components, jquery, fairly complex scss and JavaScript written to what standards were 6 or 7 years ago in order to implement new features. On top of that, I regularly fill in UX and design work when a designer isn’t available, and I run the company’s entire A/B testing process, and even find myself working with AWS configuration and the build process occasionally. That said, I love it; getting to participate in so much of the process allows me to really get a feel for the entire structure of the site as a whole, and I feel like experience in one area often informs learning in others and helps me communicate with specialists from many different areas. I could see it being a bit overwhelming coming foremost from a design background, but in my experience you do not need a degree to do this work (Mine are in Biology and Psychology). It just requires you to put in the time to research, and I personally think it’s time well spent (and a good boss will account for the fact that you may be learning things on the fly in setting project deadlines). Getting into the nitty-gritty of JavaScript and really understanding how it works and modern best practices will save you so many headaches later. I will say sometimes I feel pretty amateurish when it comes to the design aspect, because it relies so heavily on cultivating good design intuition, but even then I appreciate those opportunities to flex a different mental muscle.

I was in exactly your shoes, and they can be pretty big boots to fill. But being able to take on so many parts of the process feels really good and you get a greater feeling of ownership over the whole product. You can make smarter decisions and understand the whys of more requirements rather than just the whats and hows.

It also allowed me to develop a really strong pragmatism. With so much to learn you have to be really lean and effective with your learning and cut requirements where they don't make sense.

Unfortunately as I am experiencing it right now while it's great to be able to do lots of things and own the whole product, it is detrimental to your knowledge and your CV. I am in the job market after 14 years and my skillset is so specialised that it is hard to get a job. I got a few interviews but fell hard on home assignment. We'll see what the future brings.

I have the same fear with the road I’m taking now. I’ve changed jobs a lot in the last 10 years after staying at one job for 10, and just being a really good C# developer and then “architect” got me a long way. Along with barely passable front end skills.

But now that I’m trying to fill out the gaps on both ends - back end with a deep knowledge of AWS, Linux, Docker, devops, Node. and the front end along with some more project management experience, I’m trying to qualify for overpriced “implementation consultant” roles - since those are the only roles that pay significantly more than I’m making now in my market without going into management.

But the fear is that while having the broad expertise will qualify me for high paying jobs, there are relatively few of them out there. I have to have a deep understanding of at least part of the stack to get a job or contract gig quickly.

Before my current position I was having a really hard time finding a job because most of my experience was Flash and ActionScript (talk about dead ends...). What ultimately got me a job (well aside from having a friend at the company, which is admittedly the best strategy for getting a job) was just checking out the requirements on as many job postings as possible and cramming the frameworks that showed up the most. For instance, if you want a frontend job, learn React. You may be surprised at how transferable your prior skills will be if you just put in the training time. In a more ideal world companies would recognize this in applicants and offer to train you on their time.

I'm getting conflicting messages from your post

"while it's great to be able to do lots of things and own the whole product, it is detrimental to your knowledge and your CV."

i.e. learning larger set of skills is bad for job prospects

"my skillset is so specialised that it is hard to get a job."

i.e. focusing on a smaller set of skills is bad for job prospects

They don't necessarily conflict. People like to put other people into boxes. This person Sells. This person Develops. This per Designs. This person Manages. You are expected to be awesome at just your box, spend all your time in just that box, and above all else, to never leave your box.

If your experience is in "I do a lot of everything, really well at much of it". Then you have lots of valuable knowledge and skills, but those skills look terrible on a CV.

In practice, you could be 80% of an entire standalone product or service, you would make most companies a good chunk of money. But on your CV, you look like a part-time Junior Dev and part-time Junior Designer and part-time Junior Manager, etc. That's not a fair reading at all, but that's what ~90% of companies will assume.

---

We don't really have a word for people who can be responsible for and execute well on a most/all of a product or service. (I wish we did, because that's my history to-date, and my CV could really use a word for it).

So, when a person like this tries to apply for a job, they often have a far rougher time than you'd expect. These folks have to essentially eject a different 60% of their value for every job they apply to, which hurts them significantly in hiring/recruiting despite being an advantage when doing actual work.

As far as I can tell, the only real end-goal for people like this, is to work at a small boutique consulting firm, or open their own product houses / development studios / consulting firms. Because the majority of companies simply don't value this approach.

This is unfortunately the way I stand right now, I do a lot of everything but nothing particularly well. I too do ecommerce development but I delegate outsource / project manage things as much as possible. Things I don't entirely delegate is research,frontend design, data loading, and anything that would be too complicated to explain in a few sentences. I have a large range of specialists that I work with to carry out things like automation scripts, plugins, templating, databases, backend development, etc. But I have to spec out everything, so I myself have to know how to do mostly everything as well. Including the business side of things.

I'd rather be building things but the truth is I primarily manage. I've had my fair shares of poor hires. One was overly obsessed with tooling and couldn't deliver in a timely manner. Another I was too naiive and circumvented upwork to appease him.

It sucks when you have to figure everything out yourself. I am constantly analyzing how little work I need to do to make things run smoothly. Because there are so many battles you can fight, and so many actions you can do it one day. Delegating development tasks just makes more sense in the long run.

As a result, my CV is not really appealing to most companies. What I do instead is spend my freetime developing a personal project I have. And do technical talks / live development at my local meetups.

So, a regular programmer then?

Programmers that have front-end web development has their main area of expertise are still programmers. The difference is in the tasks. As this person said, they do CSS/JavaScript and even step in the UI/UX expert shoes. Then even do design work.

I have a similar task description and my title is "full-stack web developer".

I simply call myself "web developer" as I consider that being able to deliver a website from A to Z is a requirement of my job. From design to back-end to hosting to SEO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com