> Is there no way to treat working for big tech as a business transaction and compartmentalize the negatives?
Maybe you can, but I can't. It's so exhausting when it's an everyday thing. Constantly in Slack. Constantly in emails. Constantly expected to believe the exact same thing and if you don't you're a racist bigot that doesn't deserve life itself.
I got my start in programming in the early 2000s with Perl and, shortly after, PHP. I went through school mainly with C++ and Java and got a job as a .NET developer after.
I say all this because I fucking hated JavaScript with a passion. From the time of my initial foray into programming until my later years, I hated it. It was always a joke of a language that, honestly, caused me to develop such a bias that I nearly refused to use it, for a very long time.
Several months ago I decided to put my prejudices aside and began playing around with Nodejs and React. The main motivation was trying to learn more about front end development and guess what? I really enjoy JavaScript.
JavaScript is a very enjoyable language to play with. It has come such a long way despite, literally, all odds. The ecosystem is scattered. The build system is the most hacky monstrosity you’ve ever encountered. But, that’s one of the reasons I love it. It feels like the essence of what I feel when I imagine hacking.
And not only that, it uses a unique (at least to the paradigms I’m used to) execution model that is very performant.
These are just a lot of words for me to say I love JavaScript.
I moved from back to front and I can confidently say for me the backend is much easier. But it probably has something to do with doing it so long. I imagine given time I'd decide they're about the same difficulty.
Pleasantly surprised to see that this is a technical discussion instead of a critique against Bob's political views. I went into it fully expecting the latter.
There is still plenty to explore when you stop using mainstream websites. The internet is a vast place but most people box themselves into a worldview that doesn't allow for exploration.
American programmers are mercenaries, capitalist minded workers, that have access to a digital hive mind that not many other professions can fully access. We hold a lot more power than I think we realize.