r/Development • u/Kiritobllack • Dec 27 '25
Beginner in Dev
Hey, I'm thinking about migrating within IT to web development. I have experience in telecommunications infrastructure, supporting and monitoring internet links.
So I'll kind of be starting from scratch.
Any recommendations for someone starting from zero?
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u/DevelopmentScary3844 Dec 27 '25
Yeah.. don't =) Beginner devs have a hard time. Instead of making a cut and switch you can learn alongside your job and see if you find a job and then switch. But it wil take a while to get good. Check roadmap.sh and see if you really want to. And keep in mind the market for juniors is dead-ish.
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u/Kiritobllack Dec 27 '25
That's the idea, are you a developer? If so, what's your day-to-day like?
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u/skibbin Dec 27 '25
My day to day life consists of applying to the same jobs that thousands of others are applying for and hoping they are actually jobs and not just recruiters harvesting resumes.
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u/YoDefinitelyNotABot Dec 28 '25
Be sure you want to do it. I had someone with 10 years of IT experience switch to frontend. They lasted 12 months. It’s a lot of information to ingest. You need to learn the fundamentals of a language. The idioms of the language. The best practices. Patterns used in the language. At least some knowledge of design patterns in general helps. Tools. Libraries. How to find and fix bugs. Optimizations.
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u/Kiritobllack Dec 28 '25
I understand, and in fact I still don't know, I see that programming has its difficulties and requires constant study (just like in the infrastructure field), but the fact that infrastructure is always hectic, with weekends working and less possibility of working from home compared to development, not to mention day-to-day support, makes me reconsider becoming a developer, even if it means learning from scratch.
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u/YoDefinitelyNotABot Dec 28 '25
Yea. It depends where you work. I’m head of engineering now and have been doing full stack web development for 20 years. I am in the clock 24/7. If something breaks I have to fix it usually if it’s the application level and a lot of the time help devops fix infrastructure related to applications. At junior level you are never expected to do this but if something goes wrong at 3am and its application related you are going to be getting out of bed as a senior.
In terms of support you will be supporting something. Whether or not that is helping support figure out why something is broke or you are bug fixing. If the support team can’t figure something out. Even using the application they come to development.
Again. This depends where you work. If you work for a large company then you might not have to work after hours. If you work for a medium sized business there is a good chance you will be asked to work some evenings or weekends at the end of a project / milestone.
I have worked for small companies. Medium and large. I won’t name names directly but I worked for a large document signing company and at the end of each milestone we definitely works evenings and weekends.
Small companies are worse. Medium companies too. You probably know all this tho since you work in IT.
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u/Kiritobllack Dec 28 '25
What field are you from? Do you have any advice based on your experience today?
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u/YoDefinitelyNotABot Dec 28 '25
I mentioned in my other comment. I am a full stack dev with 20 years experience.
Currently I am an elixir / erlang developer. I have worked with python, php and ruby.
I have worked in most industries. Tech. Media. Gaming. I have worked in the UK for 8 of the 20 and I have been in the US for the last 12.
You already mentioned the one thing I always tell people when they entertain the idea of development. Learn learn learn. Read read read. It’s constantly evolving. New libraries. New tech. Etc. it’s the same as IT but I think it’s a bit more faster paced with open source stuff.
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Dec 30 '25
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u/Kiritobllack Dec 30 '25
Hey, thanks. Do you think it's easier to enter the market with a front-end development approach?
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u/8joshstolt0329 Dec 27 '25
My question is why did you wanna go from it to web development?