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Career Advice in 2025

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Re: Career Advice in 2025

#101

Post by throwaway2037 »

fifilura wrote: post #73
tibbar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly thinking of frontend dev work, but also some types of light backend work that you might see in a CRUD app. And listen, I've done that work, I've done a lot of it, and I saw that it's mostly a career dead-end, becoming more and more automated/copiloted away. It's not a career moat to be a mid-level React developer. By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, d…

I'm my view, the core of front-end work was always the UI "User Interaction". Yes some can be solved by designers, but I believe there will still be a big market for designer-programmers. The programmers that understand design, interaction, pixels and colors will still be of great value. But if you don't really care about how stuff looks or can't tell a difference between an animation at 25fps vs 50 fps, it is a good…

    > can't tell a difference between an animation at 25fps vs 50 fps
Is this commercially relevant for 99% of UIs?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#102

Post by throwaway2037 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #52
tibbar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you're really focused on the interview process for a small number of very large tech companies. My experience doesn't match yours - I have been recruited to a specific BigTech team based on my background, and the interviews were more focused on specific skills than leetcode. But it seems like most BigTech interviews probably are coding/system design. With that said, I have tended to interview more at sc…

By pay similar to BigTech do you mean the cash you get paid at a startup/scale up is similar to cash + liquid public RSUs? Equity in private companies especially in today’s climate is statistically meaningless. And if you look at the companies that pay the most + have the largest number of opportunities, they are the “small number” of BigTech companies And back to the Bay Area argument. Most of the major public tech…

    > Equity in private companies especially in today’s climate is statistically meaningless.
Does that include Stripe and SpaceX?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#103

Post by [deleted] »

tibbar wrote: post #81
sangeeth96 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You once again seem to be thinking of trivial examples of frontend to say there is an “easy” way to verify the loops. I really wish it were that simple for anything reasonably complex I encountered that were customer-facing — often filled with plugins/apps/micro-frontends/libraries owned by other teams etc or clients. I also think if it were that simple, companies wouldn’t be popping up every now and then trying to s…

> I feel you have a bleak view of frontend as a whole First of all, let me say, I love frontend. I spent probably a decade building products and tools almost entirely on the frontend. I enjoy interfaces and workflows and visualizations. I don't want you to feel like I'm attacking frontend or frontend developers. > often filled with plugins/apps/micro-frontends/libraries > It’s much, much harder to go and debug why yo…

[deleted]

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#104

Post by AIFounder »

Zee2 wrote: post #6

The statement >The current market doesn’t value those skills particularly highly, but instead prioritizes a different set of skills: working in the details, pushing pace, and navigating the technology transition to foundational models / LLMs. depends on the assumption that technology must "transition" to "foundational models / LLMs". The author doesn't seem to interrogate this assumption. In fact, most of the career…

[dead]

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#105

Post by hosteur »

mulmen wrote: post #63
klodolph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s ordinary corporate dysfunction. The mandates come top-down. People in management don’t think too hard about exceptions. The people making decisions are far-removed from the consequences of their decisions.

It’s not really an exception though. These are the same people who spent the last 20 years singing the praises of offshoring and follow-the-sun. It’s just trend chasing. Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”.

> Honestly I think the mistake we made was calling it “work from home” instead of “telecommuting”.

I am curious. Why do you think calling it telecommuting would have made any significant difference? And what difference would it have made? Where do you imagine we would be today if more people referred to it with that word?

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#106

Post by fifilura »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #101
fifilura wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm my view, the core of front-end work was always the UI "User Interaction". Yes some can be solved by designers, but I believe there will still be a big market for designer-programmers. The programmers that understand design, interaction, pixels and colors will still be of great value. But if you don't really care about how stuff looks or can't tell a difference between an animation at 25fps vs 50 fps, it is a good…

> can't tell a difference between an animation at 25fps vs 50 fps Is this commercially relevant for 99% of UIs?

Probably not, but if you are the UI developer that gets annoyed by it every time you open the application, it means you are probably in the right place.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#107

Post by schnable »

coffeefirst wrote: post #38
__loam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward. Hundreds of billions, the growth of the technology industry, the entire US stock market, and the global economy has been wagered on this technology. Imagine the turmoil when those in power realize the reality of what they're betting the farm on.

Yeah... unfortunately that might be where we are. I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.

Fiber optic and data center build out in the nineties is similar. Overinvestment led to a bust for a period, but the infrastructure was useful and provided the foundation for the next wave of Internet growth. LLMs could be similar.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#108

Post by schnable »

roncesvalles wrote: post #44
__loam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward. Hundreds of billions, the growth of the technology industry, the entire US stock market, and the global economy has been wagered on this technology. Imagine the turmoil when those in power realize the reality of what they're betting the farm on.

We've become so accustomed to the rip-roaring growth that came from widespread Internet adoption and now that it has piped down, we're desperate to find the next big boom. VR, crypto, blockchain, generative AI. And each time, like degenerate gamblers, we're feeling it , this must be it, the next Big 'Un, the bet that redeems all the bets that went wrong, bigger, riskier, bigger, riskier. But it just won't be, nothing…

I agree with the sentiment, but LLMs have already had a lot more adoption than VR and Crypto.

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#109

Post by diordiderot »

> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs.

There's a slim chance that frontend work runs into Jevons paradox.

Rather than churning out simpler interfaces faster, the complexity will grow.

More 3D sites, MR, etc

Re: Career Advice in 2025

#110

Post by only-one1701 »

itake wrote: post #97
n_ary wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs On the contrary, here in my corner of EU nearly 60% of new jobs are frontend or full stack. Anything else left is mostly SAP consultant or DevOps. I think, the whole WebDev is dead end is just false lies to dissuade new entrants. Literally most successful business with a digital solution is web stuff with some automation that would o…

Web element feel similar to PHP or wordpress development in 2010. There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work. As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, espec…

Genuine question: why do you think LLMs will be able to handle frontend development in a way they won’t be able to handle backend development? I assume you’re talking about real companies, not toy projects or websites for restaurants or whatever.
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