Web-development as a career option has been gaining ground because of a boom in e-commerce that has seen more companies gain an online presence. In the next two to three years, it is likely that more services will enforce cloud-based delivery models as their primary channel of service.
The country’s IT sector grew by over nine per cent in 2012 alone, with its domestic revenue standing at Rs. 1.71 lakh crore and its exports, at Rs. 3.73 lakh crore.
These figures stand India well as an exporter of IT services, as well as attesting to the availability of earning opportunities in this field.
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Recently, however, on-campus recruitment numbers have been dropping with respect to project-centric jobs. In order to meet demands, larger IT firms such as Wipro and Mahindra Satyam have resorted to lateral hiring options, whereby they recruit off-campus. At the same time, the demand has been consistent for cloud, mobile and social analytics, and companies looking to satiate demands in these sectors have stuck with traditional recruiting methods.
Companies like Google and Facebook have been keen about sustaining offshore communities and have conducted workshops and “hackathons” here in India to this end, complemented by the mounting prevalence of online education as well as the notion of a customised curriculum, fostering an accessible learning and growth environment.
To be a web-developer, one need not possess a degree in computer science or information technology but just needs to possess the ability to understand the demands of the primary user more than anything else.
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The technical skills can be acquired through online learn-to-code services like Code Academy, General Assembly, Udemy, Udacity, LearnStreet, and Skillshare.
As Vivek Juneja, cloud architect with Symphony Teleca, Bengaluru, says, “A successful web application needs more than just logic to work. It needs empathy with the user.”
Versatility
Because of the diversity in environments, such as those of Apple and Google, both front-end and back-end developers are expected to be able to build for and deploy products across platforms, catering to different kinds of expectations of design and productivity.
This requires a thorough understanding of user-experience (UX) principles, good design foundations that keep in mind information access through mobile devices — whose adoption rate in India grew by about 89 times in the last decade alone — and the ability to adapt to changing web standards.
At the same time, not all web-developers are required to be proficient with both front-end and back-end frameworks at the same time. This is because the two have become differentiated more strongly, requiring a developer to perform a larger variety of services instead of sticking to niche components.
For instance, the front-end developer, according to Aditya Anand, CTO of Genii Technologies, has to be concerned with design, usability, and optimising user experience. The last function involves prototyping and wire-framing new ideas, designing web-pages, and deploying a good navigation system. The primary languages to deliver these are HTML, CSS (Cascading Stylesheets), JavaScript, and the Adobe Creative Suite.
A back-end developer, on the other hand, goes after performance, operations, providing better functionality, and working with server-side systems and protocols. The common languages today for this are PHP, .NET, and Ruby on Rails.
So, are these good times to be a web-developer? Definitely.