Not only that, but developing websites 10 years ago kinda sucked. Browsers were wildly inconsistent, it was common to have another CSS stylesheet for IE only, JS was so fragmented that jQuery was an instant hit.
On the other hand pages were much smaller, you'd rely on HTML much more than on JS which meant you'd rarely be working with bundlers and such.
But still, if you take the state of the web for what it is, the sheer productivity with today's tools is unparalleled. I think the best time to start coding is tomorrow.
GoDaddy have been caught doing some dodgy things in the past. Like taking your money for brokerage and not doing any work afterwards.
Or registering domains and parking them if lot of people search for them e.g. via who is or the registration form.
Hopefully they've turned it around and actually working on useful services nowadays...
It's really quality vs quantity. Some really utilize whatever analytics tool they use, others just throw in more tools. It's a bit of a hit-and-miss industry in terms of code quality. Even the big ones.
Unfortunately my experience is as an outsourced employee so not too relevant for pitching as a contractor.
But product managers are usually pretty happy to hear you out and usually benefit from referring people they've talked to. And they respond on LinkedIn.
It shouldn't be too hard, contractors were common, employee turnover was significant too. Platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud usually have an API that supports an older version of JavaScript so employees are a bit harder to retain and a lot depends on contractors. That's why I suggested that particular platform, plus it's easy to find their customers if you browse the SFCC customer stories.
I realize it sounds like a terrible job after the above but I truly enjoyed my years there even though the quality of the websites varies a lot.
It's incredibly popular in the ecommerce world where every 1kb reduced is a lot. Target large ones - they often use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, BigCommerce, Magento.
Also any business with embeddable products and SDKs. No one is happy to make their page heavier with a script they don't own. Fintech comes to mind. Analytics companies too.
Anything with complex dashboards. Anything tailored to power users - CRMs, help desk software.
Figure out your pitch too - your job may save server costs (and increase development costs but maybe don't mention that), optimize response time of employees, increase productivity, or retain shoppers.
Genuinely curious, not judgemental here. How did the usually-much-better-paid people feel about this? Did they complain that their salaries were now closer to the lesser paid people?
Like, I could see somebody not feeling like that's fair so I'm wondering how the morale was impacted by that.
That assumes you have the means, the knowledge, and the time, to go through a build step.
What you find to be clean code might go the opposite way for someone (i.e. why would I use scss if utils are all I need?).
You might work with large scale apps where BEM may make more sense. You might work on a site builder where utils might be better. You might be creating splash pages for marketing purposes where going for element selectors may be enough.
A while ago I was thinking the same about compensation but then someone pointed out that if you were eligible for one, they would have incentive to not let you go.
It would be cheaper for everyone to just keep you unfairly.
Yup. And you can implement something that loads all the content up until that point when the user presses F5 in the middle of the page. And you can implement smooth scrolling that takes into account your sticky header. And you can make your pagination based on the ID of the last seen page item instead of based on count.
The question is, is this the best use of your time? Are you willing to invest more time in it when you give it to the user? Because the user will do something you haven't thought of, they will break it, and you will need to fix it.