Ask HN: Transitioning out of Web App CRUD, into other CS fields?

6 pointsby satellitesvor 4 Jahren5 comments

Summary: I am completely burnt out on building endless CRUD apps. I am wondering if anyone here has successfully transitioned out of that and into something more interesting, but still technical. Can be computer science related or entirely different. How did it go? How far along in your career were you? Did you go back to school? Just apply for different jobs? Etc.

More about me: I am 28 years old with 6 years of industry experience and a computer science degree. I’ve been building web CRUD apps the whole time, even back in college. I consider myself a good developer and I’ve received lots of positive feedback from colleagues over my career, but I have lost all interest in commercial web development.

I know no job is perfect and burnout is its own thing I have to deal with, but having something new to learn about and focus on would help me, I think.

So, anyone have success stories of transitioning away from web dev into other technical fields? I would love to hear about it. Cheers!

(Edited to remove my rant about why I don’t like web dev anymore so we can just focus on the career switch question).

5 comments

chrisisbuildingvor 4 Jahren

I've moved across engineering, product management, & program management. I had an easy time moving from one to another, and I've enjoyed them all.

To make the move a bit less painful for others I started curating job opportunities [1] for people just like you (us). It's a prototype at the moment, but I'd love your feedback.

[1]https://www.developerbranch.com

satellitesvor 4 Jahren

Thanks for this! I’ve found a few interesting posts already. Appreciate the link. I’ll update this comment with any specific feedback but I like it so far.

Shinmonvor 4 Jahren

Have you thought about getting deeper into system architecture/design? Distributed systems are a large beast, pretty technical and highly correlated with many business aspects.

You could leverage your web dev experience but still transition away from implementing CRUD apps.

WhiteBlueSkiesvor 4 Jahren

Why don't you like web dev anymore?

satellitesvor 4 Jahren

I can rant about this for a while, but I’ll try to distill it down into a few points.

The tasks are repetitive and boring. Many dev teams are poorly managed - they claim to be Agile, but really they use Agile as a smokescreen for micromanagement. Product designers dictate widget orders to devs who churn them out for users who didn’t ask for them. Products themselves are increasingly hostile to users. SEO and ad revenue are the main optimization metrics. Some of the big players in the space (Meta, Amazon) have lots of harm to answer for. Big companies in general are eating the web alive and consolidating control of it into monetized silos.

And with all the information coming out about how harmful our technology addictions can be, it’s hard to be stoked about creating apps that glue eyeballs to the screen.

But honestly, the boredom is the biggest thing. All the technical challenges feel “solved.” I don’t care about building yet another graphql microservice or yet another “dropdown component, but like, it looks different.” It’s just not interesting or fulfilling anymore.