It's hard for me top put into words fully but I'll attempt. Also it's not just web development in particular but really any sort of user facing / LOB / etc. application (I've done a little mobile and desktop dev as well)
For starters I haven't felt challenged by anything in years. I understand this could easily be more of the jobs I'm working, but for a while now it's seemed that the solution to almost anything is "grab x dependency and plug it in" or becomes related to hardware more than anything. It feels like majority of the fun / interesting problems have been solved and I'm just gluing them together with business logic, and the times I do end up diving into debugging what I think is an interesting problem, it was just me doing something stupid.
it also feels like all the tech is the same. Look at the job listings for any city outside the West Coast or Northeast and all the jobs are Java, .NET, maybe PHP or Node.js and likely several versions behind. I don't personally mind C# (what i currently work with), but it just kinda gets dull quick.
Finally, I guess there are just things I'm interested more. Particularly low level stuff (played around with 6502 programming and design probably around five years ago, and more recently have played with / theorized integrating vintage hardware with modern OS's for fun),etc.
Maybe the fact is that I don't fully understand that stuff, so it intrigues me more and when I finally feel knowledgeable, it will quickly lose interest, but even if I go back to doing web applications or something similar in the end, it's nice to try other things while I'm young.
Yeah I grew up in the outer suburbs of the Atlanta metro and now live in the suburbs of a smaller southern city. And I see absolutely no reasons why suburban life would appeal to a young, single male especially like myself who can't drive. Im planning to get the hell out in a few years and live in a denser city, and maybe, if I'm able to retire, live in a rural area somewhere off a nice river.
Interestingly, the suburban are I live in now if in the middle of a lower income neighborhood and a typical middle-class southern suburb. There is slight walkability, but only towards the poorer area, the sidewalk abruptly ends heading the other way
Not only that, almost every job posting I see for mainframe development wants a decade of experience working with the systems, and that's not something you can reasonably expect to self teach. I imagine most of the people who have significant experience with mainframes are retiring nowadays
I love vintage computing and have wanted a 5100 for a few years now. Unfortunately the only time I've ever seen one on sale was about a year or two ago and I just couldn't afford it
> There, all for free on the web no need to go back to school.
Oh, I don't doubt that self teaching is an option, I've just imagined this particular subfield would place more weight on a degree given that it probably requires more actual CS knowledge
> You'd still be writing code to make the hardware do stuff, just more work to achieve the same. So it might not be that exciting after a while.
Unfortunately I fear you may be right on this. It's a shame I lose interest in my hobbies as soon as I start doing them as work
> any profit generating device is to be a a bit distrusted and treated with somewhat skepticism.
Yes, but I feel that these days, at least on the internet, speaking with skepticism about medicine and pharma companies will have people equating you with anti-vaxxers, given the arguments are often similar
When I was 11 or 12 I was put on anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications (some off label). Several years later, it's discovered the company had illegally marketed one of the drugs to minors and it had developed into negative side effects in some patients, for which there was a class action lawsuit. Luckily, I never developed said side effects personally, but it did leave a level of distrust with pharma companies and to an extant the medical field
lol I went to a local music venue a few weeks back and tried this. After inquiring about one guys shirt, he started at me for a few seconds like I was insane and turned around
I'm from the south and visited Boston earlier this year and I feel like people really overdo the whole "southerners are overly nice and in your business" and "northerners are cold, uninterested and busy". People we're equally nice in both places and we had some nice, brief conversations with strangers. A friend of mine who I was with is German and he seemed to think people were exceedingly friendly
I'll believe it, the problem is I'm rarely in a situation where I'm near people and have the time to chat. The only times I've talked to strangers, have been, for example, when a crosswalk signal is taking an unusually long time to change. I'm normally at work or at home, and when I'm out, it's normally to quickly grab something to return to one of the two.
Also it's so much easier to strike up a conversation with one stranger rather than a group (which is what I usually encounter going out leisurely. Oddly I found the opposite with established friends / acquaintances. I can talk and converse with a group of my now friends much better than a single friend
I've never taken Amtrak, but from what I understand, it's not that great outside the northeast megalopolis. Every time I've looked at their site, it's always been only barely cheaper than flying and often has no trains to a destination I search. Especially if that destination is not a huge city
> I feel the same way. I went straight into the workforce with 17. Now 5 years later I feel like I absolutely need that degree to advance my career or to simply avoid my resume being thrown out.
> However, I bet the end result will be that I will work on the same trivial web applications as I am doing right now but with a pay bump and more opportunities during the job hunt.
I started working in the field professionally around 18 or 19, and I'm begging to fear this same thing. If I do decide to go back to school, it'd be in hopes that I can escape subfields that bore me to death, but I feel the reality is that there just really isn't any real job market for the things I'm interested in.