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With a decade of experience as a front end dev in this industry, I have to agree with the premise, although not for the reasons stated. AI is, and will be, huge
by ramesh31 4y ago
With a decade of experience as a front end dev in this industry, I have to agree with the premise, although not for the reasons stated. AI is, and will be, hugely disruptive for all fields of programming. But it won't be taking jobs any time soon.
The reason front end development as a skillset is coming to an end is that we've solved all of the problems that front end devs were responsible for. Front end used to be a very specific skill set that dealt with taming the complexities of cross browser support, and shoehorning the browser into a proper application platform. Those concerns are no more. Browsers have all converged on chromium-as-a-standard. Things like Tailwind/CSS-in-JS are quickly making traditional CSS skills obsolete; gone are the days of needing someone who knows how to cast arcane incantations of CSS rules to get an image centered on a page. And with modern frameworks and development techniques, all the stuff about semantic HTML and whatever else is being thrown out in favor of DevX and rendering everything as a pile of <div>s.
There has been a massive shift in the last 3-4 years where practically all job listings are now "full stack", with the expectation that UI work is "just some silly thing we have to deal with" on top of the real work. Perhaps some huge companies will maintain the separation but most have already given it up.
- boringuser1 4y ago> And things like Tailwind/CSS-in-JS are quickly making traditional CSS skills obsolete This statement literally makes no sense.
- satvikpendem 4y agoIndeed, I'm not sure how people can use Tailwind or Css-in-JS without, well, knowing CSS. It's literally CSS as another DSL.
- ramesh31 4y agoPoint being that traditional stylesheet based CSS is all but obsolete now. Any dev can pick one of ten thousand component libraries, slap a few utility classes on the element, and call it good enough.
- satvikpendem 4y agoNot when you're working at a company that wants a specific design. Tailwind and CSS-in-JS have their own issues.
- greenhearth 4y agoYeah, this is all great and lots of words, but I just spent all morning centering a radio button in a td lol
- proc0 4y agoUIs have become more complex in parallel to more sophisticated tooling. Most websites now use persistent state and are reactive, where before those features were not as widespread. So I would say it has evolved, and the entry point for FE dev is closer to typical app development than before (which was closer to design and scripting).
- ramesh31 4y ago> So I would say it has evolved, and the entry point for FE dev is closer to typical app development than before (which was closer to design and scripting). This is kind of my point. UI development will always be a thing of course. But the "front end dev" was a phenomena of the early days of the web, and needing someone to wrangle the insane complexity of the browser. Nowadays you just install some framework and off you go without any concerns for browser issues. And so it becomes like any other programming environment, where the average developer of any skill set can do it sufficiently.
- degun 4y agoNever read such a long list of inaccurate statements here on Hacker News.