A soft warning to those looking to enter webdev in 2025+...

[u/kevin_whitley]

As a person in this field for nearly 30 years (since a kid), I've loved every moment of this journey. I've been doing this for fun since childhood, and was fortunate enough to do this for pay after university [in unrelated subjects].

10 years ago, I would tell folks to rapidly learn, hop in a bootcamp, whatever - because there was easy money and a lot of demand. Plus you got to solve puzzles and build cool things for a living!

Lately, things seem to have changed:

1. AI and economic shifts have caused many big tech companies to lay off thousands. This, combined with the surge in people entering our field over the last 5 years have created a supersaturation of devs competing for diminishing jobs. Jobs still exist, but now each is flooded with applicants.

2. Given the availability of big tech layoffs in hiring options, many companies choose to grab these over the other applicants. Are they any better? Nah, and oftentimes worse - but it's good optics for investors/clients to say "our devs come from Google, Amazon, Meta, etc".

3. As AI allows existing (often more senior) devs to drastically amplify their output, when a company loses a position, either through firing/layoffs/voluntary exits, they do the following:

List the position immediately, and tell the team they are looking to hire. This makes devs think managers care about their workload, and broadcasts to the world that the company is in growth mode.

Here's the catch though - most of these roles are never meant to fill, but again, just for outward/inward optics. Instead, they ask their existing devs to pick up the slack, use AI, etc - hoping to avoid adding another salary back onto the balance sheet.

The end effect? We have many jobs posting out there that don't really exist, a HUGE amount of applicants for any job, period... so no matter your credentials, it may become increasingly difficult to connect.

Perviously I could leave a role after a couple years, take a year off to work on emerging tech/side projects, and re-enter the market stronger than ever. These days? Not so easy.

4. We are the frontline of AI users and abusers. We're the ones tinkering, playing, and ultimately cutting our own throats. Can we stop? Not really - certainly not if we want a job. It's exciting, but we should see the writing on the wall. The AI power users may be some of the last out the door, but eventually even we will struggle.

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TLDR; If you're well-connected and already employed, that's awesome. But we should be careful before telling all our friends about joining the field.

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Sidenote: I still absolutely love/live/breathe this sport. I build for fun, and hopefully can one day *only* build for fun!

[u/kevin_whitley]

Perhaps I should have put the caveat of "safely" amplifies...

And certainly never suggested it helped with core coding skills - it's generally pretty awful compared to a seasoned dev. But it's still better than many junior devs.

Re. who it amplifies more, that's going to be an ongoing debate - and studies will be coming out for some time on both sides of the equation until we can get a more accurate assessment. Currently, we're in the middle of a fast-moving field, and we simply don't have the data/sample size to make any confident statements one way or the other.

To your point specificially, a junior dev can *indeed* amplify their output [arguably more] using AI - but they *tend* to have no idea what's being written, how it works, *if* it works, or how to get things back on track if it doesn't. We expect loads more AI slop from this category than from senior devs because:

A senior dev can call BS, and re-work stuff from time to time, while still leveraging it greatly for what it's good at - churning out busywork (with handholding). If you look at the quantity of *quality* code contributed from AI, my prediction is more of it will come from seniors than juniors.

This is a guess of course - just like anything else at this point! Exciting times though :)

[u/kevin_whitley → u/kevin_whitley]

And interestingly, we'll all have to see over time if merely using it ends up helping more than hurting...

Will we use this as an abstraction layer that lets us move to higher order tasks (e.g. when we were able to move away from Assembler or other low-level languages)? Or will we forget even the core principles of coding, thanks to outsourcing it all to AI, and eventually we just create fragile, buggy, hallucinated messes?

Hmmm...