Personally, I love front end work. I love the crazy challenges and weird constraints. I love seeing a UI — something that a human interacts with — at the end of the process. Server side work can be interesting for a little while, but if I don’t see the results in the UI, it feels hollow.
Strangely, even though I’ve been doing this for twenty five years and I’ve never been better at it, in today’s bullshit interviewing environment, I can’t get a job because I can’t solve algorithms or do system designs in forty five minutes. And so I’m sitting on the sidelines right now. It’s the most bizarre experience of my career.
I’ve created projects that are used by the entire business and customer facing part of the company, which are so rock solid and user-friendly that the users and even developers who’ve come after me completely takes the functionality for granted.
One feature in particular, I came up with a lot of the UI myself, even while working with a designer. I made the backend work. I spent a lot of effort making it just feel good. It went out, I got congratulations, it was great. Now, 3 years later, it still works with minimal maintenance. Entire processes of the business have been built on top of that functionality. Everyone completely takes for granted that this highly complex system has worked with nearly zero issues for years, and allowed a ton of new features using it as a base.
And honestly building something complex that works so well that everyone takes it for granted is an amazing feeling.
I’m just extremely lucky to have management that recognizes it and has seen the value in that contribution. But I don’t know how I’d ever sell this to another company if I were to look for another job in the future.
Strangely, even though I’ve been doing this for twenty five years and I’ve never been better at it, in today’s bullshit interviewing environment, I can’t get a job because I can’t solve algorithms or do system designs in forty five minutes. And so I’m sitting on the sidelines right now. It’s the most bizarre experience of my career.