I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do

Re:I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do by tryanother on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @03:05PM (#8138665)

i could have written this. our "designer"/self-professed "front end guru" does everything wrong. everything. i've had to teach her what javascript callbacks, closures, constructor functions, and hoisting are. she's rolling her own "front end framework" (table-based layouts with a few breakpoints thrown in) and separates the code into dozens (dozens) of different CSS and JS files. i'm also getting paid shit wages. but i basically spend 90% of my non-work, non-sleeping time learning and creating things so i can have a portfolio. i don't have a CS degree, so i am taking OCW courses and MOOCs to fill in my knowledge gaps. i'm going to start building an app for a friend soon so i can put something on my github. i cannot rely on my "real" work to provide me with a meaningful portfolio. i recommend you do the same.

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Re:I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do by LandoCalrissian on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @03:52PM (#8138956)

It's maddening to hear stories like this. I'm a UI/UX Developer, and really I just end up doing most of the front end development for our team. One of the big things I focus on is making sure our conventions are clear and documented. Style guides are verbose and have code examples.

Part of being a good at frontend is bringing the biggest lift to the team overall and making their jobs as easy as possible. So many people will be touching your code at some point, so I go out of my way to make their interactions as painless as possible.

I think with frontend development in particular, it's really easy to get some people that are really unqualified. Hopefully this is changing, but I feel like a decent amount of people sell some serious snake oil because some of it bleeds into soft skills.

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Re:I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do by fuzzywalrus on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:02PM (#8139014)

Agreed, at least with the advent of precompilers and task managers like Grunt and Gulp we're starting to see a division from the previous generation of "web designers" where there's some hard skills that you simply do or don't have that can't be faked easily using bad WYSIWYG editors or rudimentary grasp of HTML and CSS.

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Re:I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do by tryanother on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:12PM (#8139083)

i could talk your ear off about the corp culture that led to this situation, but i'll spare us both! we have no style guide. the code is not modular - everything is global. when i asked if i could at least encapsulate my own feature so that it wouldn't interfere with others' code, i was told no.

i think a lot of people in hiring positions (esp at legacy corporations) just don't understand what they should be looking for with a UI/UX person. you can't just wait for the first interviewee who uses a word you haven't heard yet and hire them. it's both a science and an art. hire accordingly.

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Re:I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do by fuzzywalrus on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @03:57PM (#8138984)

Please tell me these are at the very least, CSS tables.

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Re:I have a soul-crushing job and I don't know what to do by tryanother on Tuesday August 05, 2014 @04:09PM (#8139060)

i'm fighting the good fight - the ones i write are CSS tables. the rest, no.

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