Career Advice in 2025

Yes.

It took me two years to have the illusion shatter and realize that I simply do not want to work. Imagine spending 8 hours a day plus commute sitting on your ass and writing corporate emails, and calling that self-realization. Or imagine grinding hard for a pay 50% higher than the security guard who's just playing video games, so that you feel like you're above the minimum-wage workers, but in reality you can't escape the poverty either.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to be working in a company where people who give a fuck are a minority, so there's very little pressure to actually do anything, while the pay is decent. I use some of my extra time to do some physical and mental exercise, so that my body doesn't collapse when I finally get to retire, and the rest is just spent watching porn. Being a motivated high-achiever taught me that the more you have, the more you expect, leaving you perpetually dissatisfied. The only way to be happy in life is to say "I'm staying here, this is comfy".

I'm trying to save and invest as much money as I can, so that before my body deteriorates due to aging, I might enjoy some time not having to worry about forces beyond my control or understanding carelessly ruin my life. I'm not planning to do anything spectacular once I get to retire. I'm just going to watch TikTok and I'm going to be happy.

Also a business paying $1M/year in cloud bill is neither poor nor tiny. We have very different definition of tiny and poor.

Meta is very well suited in this AI race and will prevail well. Others will cut some loss and throw some ashes sometime soon.

- Internet bubble 2001, - Blockchain bubble 2021, - AI bubble 2025,

(Omitting 2008 and Covid because they’re not startup-related).

Am I wrong or are they bubbling faster?

I hope you mean that but it's hard to see it that way based on your original comment and responses. The trope of "frontend is not a serious job" has been infuriatingly going on for a long time before LLMs took the center stage and that seeps out of the things you've said so far.

But, I'm glad if you mean what you said above.

> Here's where I'm coming from: A shockingly large amount of interesting frontend work can now be done, reasonably well, by an LLM. Sure, it's no staff frontend engineer, but you now have people who can't code at all who can dream up little apps and have the LLM actually just build it for them, something actually useful. That is absolutely incredible to me.

And this is where I'm coming from, based on your original reductive narrative on LLMs overtaking frontend and that the field is somehow at risk — if you feel the same way, you can apply these _exact_ arguments to a _shockingly_ large portion of backend too. I could say most are just glorified spreadsheets. Moreover, a lot of startups just use one of the "serverless" platforms and won't think twice about database, devops, security, authn/authz until they hit an escape velocity.

But I personally think meaningful engineering solving real-world problems at scale that is meant to be an enjoyable experience for the user should be well thought through, end-to-end, regardless of the smaller scopes within.

> Candidly, I just don't see the same momentum for AI in the database/infra space, and speaking personally, I thought it was the right move to shift in that direction.

Partly, I think you are probably forgetting that a lot of these startups promising all of this also promise the backend stuff, even if you might disagree with the choice of tech stack (usually React/Next w/ Supabase/Planetscale/Firebase) and the deployment environment (usually something like Vercel). And the reason why the frontend part is front and center is because... well... that's what the users ultimately interact with. They don't give two shits about the stack (front & back) as long as the product works and works well. But it'd be naive to think this didn't involve all the automated code being spit out on the backend side as well.

And let's forget AI for a moment, by this line of thinking, a large portion of the backend engineering you talk about have been available in simplified forms via serverless offerings or via low-code offerings. Same for databases, including branching and claims of seamless migrations and backup. So, maybe you should have started panicking way before modern LLMs hit the scene? :)

But you probably won't because like me, you realize it's not that simple and it's not always practical. Same reason why I am not using Framer/v0/ to build a non-trivial front-end app with growing complexity.

I'm a cautious optimist in this space. I do think the tech we got so far is cool and groundbreaking and I use them extensively for noodling. But at the end of the day right now, they're still tools. We are seeing the AI leaders shifting goalposts every day, complain about lack of data etc. and I honestly believe we are many more breakthroughs away from getting to the dream world you're thinking of, especially when broadly generalizing things.

> Aside: I'm also pretty sure you can find plenty of "AI" companies promising automated DevOps/Backend/Database etc. just within https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (try keyword searches).