This series is was a guide for aspiring front-end developers to get and keep a job as quickly as possible.
Something unexpected happened between this and last post - I was made redundant.
In fairness, they were very transparent - they were eliminating my role - the frontend hands-on technical lead.
With time to reflect on it, and the wider industry, it does seem as though my bosses caught the “we can finally fire our software engineers” mind virus that has infected the business hive mind.
Nonetheless, it was a shock. So much so, that when I saw the ominous redundancy meeting scheduled entitled “Frontend Team Update”, a part of me genuinely thought it could be for a promotion! But alas, no, my job (as the 1 of 1 full-time FE dev) was being eliminated; and the FE international contractors are not having their contracts renewed. I was going to be out of a job.
So now - a crossroads.
Is FE development the right career for me going forward?
On one hand:
- my senior dev salary was high considering GenAI could do a pretty good job
- there are some sensational tools out there for AI web development
- the skill gap between a jr dev + AI and a mid level dev was basically non existent
- web devs are only ever going to become less valuable over time
On the other:
- my experience makes me more productive with AI than a junior/mid level dev
- good luck to juniors fixing the code when it goes wrong
- we’re in the GenAI hype cycle atm - and GenAI is close to its peak - senior FE could bounce back
In addition to these points, there’s a very important factor, that we was web devs underestimate.
Non web developers significantly underestimate the skill that goes into what we do. They assume that because they did a 1 month course on it at uni, or built their own Geocities website, or that people can self-teach it without a CompSci degree, that it is therefore a pretty trivial job.
Any web developer knows how absurd this idea is, but remember:
You’re not paid what you’re worth - you’re paid what industry thinks you’re worth. Together with supply and demand changes through redundancies like my own the remaining jobs are now for less money and have a much worse work-life balance.
I’m left with the clear answer - no.
Then… what is the right career moving forward?
First, is there a different software engineering job that is insulated from these changes?
Consider that:
- Whether directly affected by GenAI or not, the influx of other devs retraining could affect those jobs too.
- May have to learn a new languages repeatedly as they are replaced
- The market’s perception of the profession’s skill level decreases as it is automated
If there was a different programming language job, what might it look like?
- unintuitive syntax
- vague error messages
- having to carry context a long way (e.g. a pointer, matching braces)
- small standard library
- limited stackoverflow activity
So, for instance: Fortran, Objective-C, Prolog, VBA, COBOL, Lisp.
While becoming a legacy software engineer does sound fun, the continuous fear of impending job obsolescence would make the job far more stressful than it could be.
Software engineering is not the way in 2025 - for me at least.
As such, this series has unfortunately come to a premature end.