MirandaHi, I'm Miranda. I've been a front-end web developer for several years, and if you're thinking about entering the vast career of front-end development, you might be wondering...
Are front-end developers happy?
Do they find fulfillment? Joy? Meaning?
Should you seek out a career in front-end development or look the other way?
And I have an answer! It depends.
It depends on your personality: the way you experience and handle challenges, and the way you conceptualize education and learning.
Read on to find out if front-end development will make you happy or make you miserable.
Front-end web development will not make you happy if...
You think front-end development is easy
You think HTML, CSS, and Javascript is baby stuff compared to complex object-oriented programming languages that run native applications. Sure --- you're super smart and could have been a software engineer coding complex networking components, easily! But you settled for front-end development. Trying is uncool anyway.
You think having a computer science degree makes you 'overqualified'
You have an expensive degree you haven't quite payed off, and you learned a lot of computer theory in college. You've been introduced to data structures (like hashes and trees) as well as sorting algorithms and Big O notation --- though you don't remember it all too well. In any case, the low-level computer stuff you learned is far more complex than HTML, so that makes you overqualified for the job.
You think designers 'being picky' is ruining your life
Designers are ruining your life. They keep telling you to adjust line-height and padding and to line things up correctly. They don't like that the layout breaks at certain browser widths. But come on! The site looks good enough. Nobody's going to see the page at that width anyway.
You think you must get it to look the way you want in less than 15 minutes
If you don't know the answer in 15 minutes, you sit at your desk and hold your head until someone asks you if "everything is alright," which is an invitation to vent. They'll understand. The machine is wrong, after all.
You think "it should just work"
All the time, things that you thought would work just doesn't. And no matter what you try, you are constantly wrangling web pages to no avail. It's so frustrating. Why would anyone choose front-end web development?
