I learned Vue.js by working 72 hours a week. Twelve hours a day, six days a week — the same agency I mentioned in the burnout post. Same company, same grind, different technology stack.
This was a different agency from the template shop. This one was supposed to be more “modern.” They built things with Vue.js instead of WordPress. Single-page applications, interactive dashboards, dynamic frontends for clients who wanted something beyond a brochure site. On paper, it sounded like a step up from installing cracked Elementor themes. In practice, the hours were the same. The owner was just as disconnected from what development actually costs in time and energy. The only difference was the framework.
Learning Vue.js on the Job
I didn’t come into that agency knowing Vue.js. I learned it there, on live projects, with real clients depending on the output. That’s a stressful way to learn a framework — every mistake you make while learning costs time you don’t have and affects work that’s already been sold to someone who doesn’t care about your learning curve.
But it forced me to learn fast. When your only option is to figure it out before the end of the day, you figure it out. Components, props, state management, the composition API, Vue Router — I learned all of it under pressure, with a client waiting and a boss asking for status updates every few hours. It’s not the ideal learning environment, but it works. You don’t forget what you learned at 11 PM on a Thursday while a production bug is burning and the client’s demo is tomorrow morning.
The agency was building the kind of projects that need a reactive frontend: dashboards with real-time data, multi-step forms with complex validation rules, interactive product configurators where the UI changes based on user selections. WordPress couldn’t handle those gracefully without heavy customization. Vue.js was the right call for the technology — but the environment it was deployed in was not.
I remember one specific project: a dashboard for a logistics company that needed live tracking updates, a calendar view for scheduling, and role-based access for different team members. In Vue.js, this was a well-structured single-page app with components for each view. The architecture was clean. The execution was a disaster because we had three days to build it and the design wasn’t finalized until the day before delivery. We shipped it with placeholder data and bugs we knew about but couldn’t fix.
The Sweatshop Reality
The “sweatshop” label is not an exaggeration. When you’re working twelve hours a day, six days a week, the quality of your work degrades whether you’re using Vue or vanilla JS. I made mistakes I wouldn’t have made with a reasonable schedule. Pushed broken code because the deadline was in two hours. Skipped unit tests because there was literally no time. Cut corners on error handling because the feature had to ship by end of day. Every shortcut felt temporary, but they all became permanent because there was never time to go back.
The owner didn’t care about code quality. He cared about the client seeing progress. A working demo at the end of the week was worth more than a stable, well-architected application. Technical debt was encouraged because it was invisible to the client. The phrase “we will fix it later” was used daily. Later never came because there was always a new project waiting and the old project’s client had already paid. The only person who dealt with the debt was the next developer touching that code — which was usually me.
I learned Vue.js in that environment, but I also learned what unsustainable development looks like. A team running on caffeine and guilt cannot produce quality software. They produce software that barely works, then the developers leave and a new team inherits the mess.
What I Took From It
The Vue.js skills stuck with me. I use them today in my own projects. Reactivity, component composition, single-file components — those concepts transfer to any modern framework. The technical foundation I built there is solid, and I am grateful for the hands-on experience even if the conditions were brutal.
But the lesson about working conditions stuck harder. A framework is just a tool. The environment you use it in determines whether you grow or burn out. I grew technically at that agency — I went from knowing zero Vue to shipping production SPAs in a few months. But the personal cost was too high. Headaches, dark circles, permanent exhaustion — I paid for those Vue.js skills with my health, and I would not make that trade again.
If you’re learning a new framework in a high-pressure job, recognize the trade-off. You will learn fast, but you will also learn bad habits. The urgency will teach you to skip testing, documentation, and clean architecture. Those habits are harder to unlearn than the framework is to learn. I am still unlearning some of them years later.
The Vue.js sweatshop gave me a skill I value. But it also gave me a clear standard for what I won’t tolerate again. Twelve-hour days are not a badge of honor. They are a sign that the business model is broken, and the developers are the ones absorbing the cost in health, sleep, and self-respect.
