I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the right job. I'm at the right level, I'm leading a team, mentoring juniors, cross-discipline collaborating, prototyping and making front-end tech stack decisions and that part is pretty great.
What I am doing: creating simple, robust interfaces with fairly minimal technologies, using 11ty, sass and sprinkling in js conservatively for everyone's benefit, and building an approach that will make changes in the future as trivial as possible. I'm building web apps that will be handed off to java devs who's web skills are a decade out of date and making it as hard as I can for them to fail.
What I'm *not* doing: dealing with browser performance, enhancing accessibility, writing fire-breathing CSS and diaphanous JS, demonstrating that progressive enhancement is a powerful tool at scale and using boring tools to get there. I love this stuff but my job simply doesn't need it.
I'm finding greenfield development kind of boring? I like coming up with wacky solutions to hard problems. I like refactoring and redesigning and fixing things and solving problems.
If I can't figure out how to engineer my own job into the direction I want, I have absolutely no idea how to go and find the position that shares my priorities, and I've been getting programmer jobs for 16 years now. I suspect I'm looking in the wrong place and my next job title will not be Lead Front End Dev, but I can't imagine what it might be.
What do you think, fediverse?
@threetonesun
So you're suggesting the half of the job I'm missing got sent over to design? That makes sense
@braindouche I feel like a lot of companies have embraced design system teams but aligned them closer to the design side, so you get a base level of consistency and then weird silo’d applications on top ready to tip over. There seems to be some better way to build out microfrontends that aren’t Frankenstein-ing eight bad React apps together, and a role that helps make those decisions on how.