> I want to get into web dev because as far as I can tell nearly all remote jobs are web dev jobs and it seems pretty easy to learn.

If you're entering with that mindset, the industry is going to chew you up.

Yes, it's easy to get started but that's not going to get you one of the good entirely-remote jobs. It's enough to get you started doing an apprenticeship though.

Then you have to learn, learn, learn, and learn some more. Experiment with tools and practices, be proactive in taking on tasks, and learn from more senior people. And then learn some more.

The "good" remote jobs come from having a solid resume and some contacts in the space. The above is how you do it.

I would agree with most of the content but not the tone here.

You do need some experience and a skillset and a LOT of learning to be fully able to contribute well in a remote job. It won't necessarily be easy to learn, but its certainly possible.

The industry is pretty forgiving in my experience - I was fully remote after about 2-3 years of working in an office (negotiated heavily) and had no problems afterwards. If you're going for one of the "great" remote-entirely jobs remember you're competing against a much larger group of people. So managers/people hiring can either work with people who know that you can do it, or they'll try to find someone who is a head above everyone else. Or you can make your own business if you like.

Find a niche whose sole responsibility drives the bottom line.

Advertising is a good one if you have strong networking and rich media fundamentals. One good web dev with a solid background and comfort working in advertising can produce better than an entire team of devs new to the industry. The web and app ecosystems run on ads and always will. People have been claiming the death of it for two decades now, yet ads generate more and more every year. You can apply the industry knowledge across the stack and type of company; big or small, demand side or supply side, consumer focused or SaaS.

People will also chime in and suggest fintch since its so trendy these days. But, do you really trust a banker to look out for your bottom line? Exactly.

I strongly disagree that ads will be here forever. Although the amount of money generated through ads year upon year is increasing, that's mostly due to the increase in people using the internet, and the amount of time they spend on it.

The amount of people using adblockers has increased _dramatically_. In fact, one of the top HN comments is about the rising use of Ad-blockers [0].

There will eventually be a limit where the increasing use of technology is outweighed by the amount of people using adblockers, and I'd wager it's within the next 5 years. Then the ad ecosystem will just fall and fall.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/technology/ad-blocking-in...

Why assume adblockers are bigger than the advertising industry? Adblocking will exist up until it's cheaper for large players to pay money to fix the problem, be that legal costs, development, or ransom to browser providers.

Particularly when the web is getting more and more closed. Sure, adblockers on browsers are becoming more common. But what about web services like snapchat where the information is transferred using an app rather than a browser? Ad blockers can't do shit if sites start to properly hide ads within content. So far they've been relying on large players not trying to, while being able to completely block content from smaller players when they try to play the 'hide the ads' game. Let's see them try that when they're faced with blocking all of facebook/google or not blocking their ads.

Internet advertising will change because of the rising use of adblockers but collapse? I don't see it.

Advertising always morphs into something different. It is a never ending business. Billboards, Newspaper ads, magazine ads, radio ads, tv ads, online, in app, facebook, snapchat and I don't what will be there in future. As long as we have eyes there will be ads.

Or ears! I'd be interested to know if anyone has been served advertising in Braille.

I'd trust a banker just as much as an ad exec (that is, not at all).

Sometimes you'll be working for a creative agency when working with ad execs which I think are a different personality type than a typical banker who always work for banks.

This. Ad tech Will last till the end of internet. It is a good place to be, remote include.

You'll have to go for the technology that's hot right now.

I guess this week it's React, but some say that Vue may surpass it in terms of popularity by next Wednesday.

In all seriousness though: learn vanilla js and you'll be fine.

"I guess this week it's React, but some say that Vue may surpass it in terms of popularity by next Wednesday."

haha thanks for the laugh!

Vue isn't going to surpass React. Unless it migrates its API to clone React.

Have to agree, those of us that work on seriously large systems and have a strong foundation in design principals and system architecture are not going to switch to a system that takes us back to procedural controllers and weak components that are not self encapsulating.

It's sad that React get's such a bad wrap when it really is a simple framework. But somehow react gets a bad wrap for the entire Javascript stack (npm, webpack, etc..). React does not require these, but experienced software developers who have been bite by lack of dependency management, build management, etc etc tend to favor this stack because they need maintainability of code base. Sure it's a little more learning curve than throwing jquery on a page, but once you learn the js build stack the benefits outweigh the investment. I too believe React is here to stay for a while, it's a well built framework built buy guys that value proper design and prudence over magic that morphs into spaghetti.

Remote work isn't for people still figuring out how to do a job. It is obviously best suited for pros/seniors so the best advice would be to become a sênior Engineer first.

While knowing a particular technology is useful, there are other prerequisites to remote work.

In particular, you need to be able to work independently, and employers have to be confident of that as well. If you have no work experience that demonstrates the ability to work independently you are unlikely to get remote work.

Good point.

Perhaps starting off with some short-term consultancy gigs to build it first would help.

A few years ago Bluecross Blueshield in Chattanooga would hire almost anyone that wanted to learn Cobol and train them, I have a friend that got in on this. I also have a relative making insane amounts of $ as a Cobol developer, but honestly Cobol is no fun (for me) and I wouldn't do it. There are a lot of Cobol devs retiring now and in the next few years and not many people want to replace them.

I can't think of anything that is Web Dev, Remote, $100 hour, and less than 5 years of experience.

What's the insane amount of $ ? (For the Cobol development.)

But are those Cobol jobs remote?

Any job can be remote if you're in demand and the employer needs you more than they need you.

Find their pain points and negotiate.

Typo: the employer needs you more than you need them.

You got it backwards.. First find the high paying job with remote opportunities.. then learn what you need. :)

> "then learn what you need."

But how do I learn the 5+ years of experience?

To literally answer your question: by working 5+ years in the industry.

Typically this isn't a firm requirement

Most likely, it's probably some obscure language or stack that pays high because they can't find anybody.

I suggest brushing up on Cobol or Fortran, and techniques to bang some web services in front of those creaky old servers.

Find a stack you like and don't just learn to use it learn how it works.

The money will be good no matter what you choose, but if you enjoy it your skills are going to be sharper. When you can do things faster/better than the next guy the money will follow.

You're going to find that you will change frameworks and tech stacks fairly frequently over the years. Focus on proving you can learn quickly and solve large problems. Best bet for long term roi is probably to learn patterns, web architecture and vanilla js. With that said, react/redux are good bets for library/frameworks to learn for now. And node.js if you want to avoid picking up another language for backend development for now.

Some time ago there was a thread about some app that got popular which the dev busted out in a few days because he knew his way around heroku hackathon-starter / node.js https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter

Well then I guess I'll start doing some personal projects using some arbitrary stacks, find a job based on that and suck it up for 5 years.

That's one approach, but be careful you don't burn out. I'd also say that tech moves fast enough that you'll need to finetune your approach if you want something to run with for 5 years.

If you want something that'll be good for 5 years look at stacks/technologies that have existed for a little while and are known to be fairly stable/mature, eg everything from jQuery (ubiquitous; embarassed I don't yet know it myself) to Go (newish, but very pragmatic, fewer surprises/less conflict than other offerings, by some margin; on my todo list).

Rust and React are wildly popular in their own ways (they're totally unrelated) but much newer, and I understand they're sufficiently chaotic enough that people can't quite tell if they'll die out next week or stick for the next 5 years, even though they're going incredibly strongly right now.

Most of tech fits into categories like this.

Also, about doing personal projects using arbitrary stacks, that's an excellent idea, but note that the general goal here is learning - I read in a thread on here the other day that building stuff purely to advertise competence is almost never a good idea. A commentator noted that the most you'll get in that case is an "oh, okay, nice" unless your project is relevant to the company (hard) or truly generally unique (really hard). Best case scenario is that a headhunter trawling GitHub notices it.

Hm, now I think about it, it might also be worth it to consider the ramifications of the kind of things you build. If they're things that would gather a small userbase but would be difficult to charge for, maybe think about how "yay I got a job from making this but now I have no time to maintain it" would work out. Handoff? Established GitHub organization you can add other users to? etc. Users remember their customer-service experiences :P

See the latest trends at https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar