Comment by austin-cheney

Becoming a developer.

I was an experienced visual web designer. A few months after joining Travelocity I was involuntarily reassigned to a UI developer position. If I wanted to stay employed I had to learn to program. That first year I was shitty at it, occasionally broke stuff, and received a negative annual evaluation. This was 2008.

Shortly after that the economy collapsed. There were massive layoffs and a lot of good people were fired. I was not one of the good people and I was not fired. Before jQuery became an obsessive religious cult UI developers were tough to hire. The world was full of UI developers that were so much worse than me. Super incompetent was the industry performance average.

Learning to program for real.

In 2009 I was picked up for my second military deployment. I am a soldier in the Army Reserves and spent the next year in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan I learned to program for real by writing original applications. After a year of grinding I was still shitty as far as being an actual application developer, but I was orders of magnitude superior compared to the average corporate JavaScript developer.

My first career mistake.

I managed to pick up the CISSP certification at the end of that deployment. I should have done the work to transition my career to cybersecurity, but lacked the confidence to figure that out. I had a guaranteed job waiting for me Travelocity so I went back to the childish career of web developer.

I received 3 raises and a promotion the year I returned to Travelocity. I became a senior when I became the company experimentation engineer for A/B testing.

My second career mistake.

In 2014 I came back to Travelocity after another year in Afghanistan. At this point Travelocity began to internally implode so I left to explore other opportunities. I should have stayed at Travelocity. Instead I bounced around the market getting small raises at joining each new employer.

As the years went by I continued to become more experienced almost entirely due to challenging side projects. The career became progressively more shitty as my average peers seemed progressively more child-like and progressively more fearful of writing code.

After 5 years at Bank of America I left there for a work from job for a small company with complete garbage for internal code. I didn’t even make it a year before I was laid off. I made a promise to myself to never go back to the toddler daycare of JavaScript employment.

I was picked up by a defense contractor to do work on enterprise API management. Within a year the promoted me into management involuntarily. This is my current job and it’s been amazing. The people are so much more mature that the comparison is beyond words.

I wouldn’t go back to JavaScript stupidly unless it’s vanilla JavaScript work to guarantee I would be working with decent people or $500,000 to compensate for working with arrogant children.