The reality of working in tech: We're not hired to write code (2023)

In most companies, writing code is the last thing developers (should) do. You're there to achieve business objectives, and you were hired because someone thought your experience and skillset will be necessary to achieve those business objectives. Sometimes those objectives are met with an excel sheet, sometimes they're met by losely integrating various 3rd parties, sometimes they're met by integrating various libraries, and sometimes it requires treading new ground and writing some real code.

The best web dev isn't the one that knows .Net, React, Svelte, GraphQL, micro-frontends, etc. The best web dev is the one that can convince their manager that their business objectives can be achieved by using WordPress.

Oh wow… the WordPress example…

Worked at a SaaS company that had a fantastic product and a great tech team that had built it.

We also did a lot of data-based research and published it as white papers for lead gen.

We wanted to start publishing more content on our site to expand reach, so the team decided a CMS would be a solution for the researchers and content marketers to publish without any tech involvement.

Well it turns out our CTO, for a few justifiable reasons if we’re painting with a broad brush, absolutely loathed WordPress. So despite our arguments an integration would be easier/cheaper/less time consuming for everyone, we built our own CMS instead.

And we, of course, ended up with a significantly worse version of WordPress that the content folks all hated.

So it goes.