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August 17th, 2022 × #jobs#career#webdev

Job Types Agency, Tech, Startup, Entrepreneur VS Tech company VS In House

Scott and Wes discuss the pros and cons of different web development jobs like agencies, tech companies, startups and freelancing.

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Topic 0 00:00

Transcript

Announcer

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talensky and Wes Bosch.

Topic 1 00:11

Intro

Guest 1

Oh, welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Today, we've got a show for you. Started as a potluck. Now it's a full blown show. We're gonna talk about different kinds of web developer jobs that you can get into and the Pros and cons between them. So we've got agency consultancies, a tech company, start up, in house, corporate government, freelance, and entrepreneur.

Guest 1

Talk about all of them.

Topic 2 00:35

Sponsors

Guest 1

We are sponsored by 3 awesome companies today. LightStep Incident Response, the all in one incident response platform for DevOps and SREs, FreshBooks Cloud Accounting, and LogRocket JavaScript session replay. We'll talk about all of them partway through the episode.

Guest 1

With me as always is mister Scott Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey. I am doing good, man.

Topic 3 00:53

Check-in

Guest 2

Just, just Just living it, you know, pretty deep into the building of the next UI version of our our site right now. And I've gotten to the point where, like, My primitive components that I've written to help me do this design are all, like, working just a really nice way. And it does rid. Start to feel like I'm assembling the LEGO pieces.

Guest 2

A lot of the functionality is, you know, the same as it was before, so I'm not having to get into too much beyond CSS and HTML stuff.

Guest 2

So it really feels like it's in a good spot, and it just keeps moving forward. So I I'm in that that re slow mode where you're working on designs. You're iterating fast.

Guest 2

You're adding a couple of components or classes to things, and they're just kinda falling into place.

Guest 2

So, it couldn't be feeling any better about it right now.

Guest 1

So Right. Yeah. It's right. Right on. Right on. Alright. Well, let's get into it. We had a potluck question Last potluck. And someone said, like, like, what are the pros and cons of the different types of jobs that are out there? I'm like, well, like, there's a lot to think about, and and Scott and I have worked In a lot of these, we have experience in a lot of the different situations, so we are gonna sort of get into it. I thought we first describe Each of the different categories, and then we'll dive into the pros and cons of each. So let's just do, like, a high level.

Topic 4 01:47

Agency Work

Guest 1

And and there, of course, there are other categories than this, but these are sort of the big four, I'd like to think. So the first one is the agency or consultancy and grouping rid together.

Topic 5 02:28

Agency Overview

Guest 1

And then this is generally, you are a developer that is hired by another company, to build a product or solve a problem. So you're kind of a a a hired gun where you either either go into other companies. That's Kinda more of a consultancy where you go into a company and you fix something, or an agency where it's, like, a company will hire the agency to build out rid A product, a marketing campaign. Agency world tends to be very popular in, like, advertising

Topic 6 02:59

Agency Experience

Guest 2

online ad space, rid. Although that's not the only space. Yeah. What's your experience in working with, with an agency or in an agency? Do you have any experience there, Wes? Yeah. Quite quite a bit, because

Guest 1

when I was doing freelance, quite a bit of my work was, agencies have overflow work, and they need people to come on and let go, as they spike up and down. So what I would do is I would just come on as a sort of hired gun. So it's almost like an employee, but I also had other clients at the time, so quite a bit. We I had worked for probably 6 or 7 different agencies over the time on various projects.

Guest 1

Some of them were really, really cool. Some of them were maddening, and we'll talk about that as well as, like, there's different sizes of agencies as well. There's Two people agencies. There's,

Topic 7 03:44

Agency Sizes

Guest 2

what, 2,000 person agency. Right? Yeah. My my first 3 jobs were all agencies, and it's funny because, I my 1st job was, like, a 24 person agency, and then we moved to, like, a 40 person agency. And then my 3rd job was, like, this 2,000 person agency. So rid. I kind of have experienced it, like, all different sizes of agencies. So I think I'll be able to add a little bit of insight in here too,

Guest 1

in terms of, like, the differences there. We we're gonna give, like, examples of companies from each of the ones. So, like, what are some of the rid The big agencies that are out there. Big agencies? You mean

Topic 8 04:19

Large Agencies

Guest 2

Yeah. I know Massive size? Like

Guest 1

Yeah. Well known one. That's actually a great question. I don't have my I don't know. Blast radius is a big one.

Topic 9 04:41

Agency Examples

Guest 1

Publicis is actually a really a big one. Oh, there's another really good one that is in New York, and they build some of the rid stuff out there. A k q a. It's just two letters. A k q a. Are you familiar with them? No. I'm not. They do a lot of video and stuff. They're mostly like a branding agency, but I'm sure they do web as well. Oh, yeah. Boku is a a very big they're more of a consulting company where they would get hired by Browser vendors and all kinds of people to do solve JavaScript problems.

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