6 ms·

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

by tibbar 2y ago

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, data engineering, stats, etc, and I've spent the last few years pivoting into those areas. An interesting counter-point is that if you have great product and design skills, this is a great time to learn frontend development, because it's more accessible than ever and can supercharge your existing skills. But the days of being a pure frontend coder are probably fading.

krishnakanna18 2y ago
> infrastructure, databases, data engineering I work as a backend dev, without an opportunity to work on these at my current company. How do I learn and showcase these skills effectively. Thanks!
- tibbar 2y ago
  Realistically, you need to bootstrap your experience in these areas. Pick an area to focus on and put your own time into learning it. My rule of thumb is that you need about 100 hours of personal study to get to "smart intern" level in a particular tech skill, given that you're already a professional developer. I typically bootstrap a skill by picking a textbook to work through and combining it with personal projects and adjacent reading as it comes up. Usually after ~100 hours or so you will be able to arrange an internal transfer to work on that stuff in your day job.
- zuzuleinen 2y ago
  I highly recommend csprimer for this. https://csprimer.com/ https://csprimer.com/ Or if you want to just use books go with: https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/
kristiandupont 2y ago
>infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats Why would those areas be less exposed to the "LLM threat"?
- ozim 2y ago
  Amount of quality fronted code in public repositories, blogs etc. is much higher. Then even if it is not in the repo it is available via browser. Backend code is much less available as a training set.
- tibbar 2y ago
  To be brutally honest, LLMs aren't very good at solving novel problems, they aren't very good at integrating business context, and they make many small mistakes. That's why they are a good fit for frontend development! Frontend features are 1. often quite deterministic (well-defined specs and mockups from product managers) and 2. repetitive (95% of all frontend features have already been built many times in the training set) and 3. small mistakes often don't really matter much, the page will just be slightly degraded. Speed of development usually beats perfection. So you can often say "hey, Claude, here is the exact feature I want, this has been done many times before, can you update the codebase to mostly do that?" And Claude can do that in a lot of cases now, and will probably continue to get better at it over time. By contrast, infrastructure work tends to be more complex and higher stakes (a small mistake can cost you a lot of money or downtime). Also you usually aren't optimizing as much for a large number of small features. So there's just not as much value, and much more danger, in turning an LLM agent loose on this stuff.
  - sangeeth96 2y ago
    This is an extremely dumb take, I’ve worked on both areas before and I could say that infra work is mostly repeated and needlessly complex config sprayed into git. LLMs have seen enough of that to make head or tails of it by the way you’re characterizing frontend dev.
    - tibbar 2y ago
weatherlite 2y ago
> By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats, etc I can't imagine why if LLMs can magically solve web development (which can be complex as hell depending on the app) they wouldn't be able to solve infrastructure, database or data engineering. I somewhat agree that our career moats were hurt (though not as much as you seem to believe in my opnion) but that's happening across the board.
csomar 2y ago
Front-End interfaces can be as complex (or more complex) than Back-End/infra/analytics/etc... At the end of the day, it is all about data and the front-end needs to maintain state. If your interface is complex, your state will also be complex.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Theoretically - yes, practically, on average, any of the things you’ve listed is far, far, far more complex than your average frontend that is basically glue between “real” logic and user.
  - csomar 2y ago
    If you are doing CRUD simple data apps, I don’t get why your backend will be complicated. Sure the industry has complicated stuff (aws & friends) for complexity sake but that doesn’t mean you have to go down that rabbit hole. Front-End is complex which is why we have 36362 libraries to solve the same problem and still move user interfaces sucks.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  I'm not a fan of the "front vs back" dichotomy. Chrome is just another box as far as my responsibilities and goals are concerned, but it always feels like there's a mental handoff switching to this one context.
fifilura 2y ago
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 sign it is time to try something else. AI will simply refine your skillset. A backend programmer will have more time to think about architecture, a data engineer/scientist will have more time to think about maths. Or in essence "what am I trying to achieve". And it is up to you to step up to it. I rather think of this generation with hordes of "coders, writing code" as an anomaly.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > can't tell a difference between an animation at 25fps vs 50 fps Is this commercially relevant for 99% of UIs?
  - fifilura 2y ago
    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.

by tibbar 2y ago

krishnakanna18 2y ago

> infrastructure, databases, data engineering I work as a backend dev, without an opportunity to work on these at my current company. How do I learn and showcase these skills effectively. Thanks!

tibbar 2y ago
Realistically, you need to bootstrap your experience in these areas. Pick an area to focus on and put your own time into learning it. My rule of thumb is that you need about 100 hours of personal study to get to "smart intern" level in a particular tech skill, given that you're already a professional developer. I typically bootstrap a skill by picking a textbook to work through and combining it with personal projects and adjacent reading as it comes up. Usually after ~100 hours or so you will be able to arrange an internal transfer to work on that stuff in your day job.
zuzuleinen 2y ago
I highly recommend csprimer for this. https://csprimer.com/ https://csprimer.com/ Or if you want to just use books go with: https://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/

kristiandupont 2y ago

>infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats Why would those areas be less exposed to the "LLM threat"?

ozim 2y ago
Amount of quality fronted code in public repositories, blogs etc. is much higher. Then even if it is not in the repo it is available via browser. Backend code is much less available as a training set.
tibbar 2y ago
To be brutally honest, LLMs aren't very good at solving novel problems, they aren't very good at integrating business context, and they make many small mistakes. That's why they are a good fit for frontend development! Frontend features are 1. often quite deterministic (well-defined specs and mockups from product managers) and 2. repetitive (95% of all frontend features have already been built many times in the training set) and 3. small mistakes often don't really matter much, the page will just be slightly degraded. Speed of development usually beats perfection. So you can often say "hey, Claude, here is the exact feature I want, this has been done many times before, can you update the codebase to mostly do that?" And Claude can do that in a lot of cases now, and will probably continue to get better at it over time. By contrast, infrastructure work tends to be more complex and higher stakes (a small mistake can cost you a lot of money or downtime). Also you usually aren't optimizing as much for a large number of small features. So there's just not as much value, and much more danger, in turning an LLM agent loose on this stuff.
- sangeeth96 2y ago
  This is an extremely dumb take, I’ve worked on both areas before and I could say that infra work is mostly repeated and needlessly complex config sprayed into git. LLMs have seen enough of that to make head or tails of it by the way you’re characterizing frontend dev.
  - tibbar 2y ago

weatherlite 2y ago

> By contrast, some things I think are worth pivoting into include infrastructure, databases, data engineering, stats, etc I can't imagine why if LLMs can magically solve web development (which can be complex as hell depending on the app) they wouldn't be able to solve infrastructure, database or data engineering. I somewhat agree that our career moats were hurt (though not as much as you seem to believe in my opnion) but that's happening across the board.

csomar 2y ago

Front-End interfaces can be as complex (or more complex) than Back-End/infra/analytics/etc... At the end of the day, it is all about data and the front-end needs to maintain state. If your interface is complex, your state will also be complex.

wiseowise 2y ago
Theoretically - yes, practically, on average, any of the things you’ve listed is far, far, far more complex than your average frontend that is basically glue between “real” logic and user.
- csomar 2y ago
  If you are doing CRUD simple data apps, I don’t get why your backend will be complicated. Sure the industry has complicated stuff (aws & friends) for complexity sake but that doesn’t mean you have to go down that rabbit hole. Front-End is complex which is why we have 36362 libraries to solve the same problem and still move user interfaces sucks.
gopher_space 2y ago
I'm not a fan of the "front vs back" dichotomy. Chrome is just another box as far as my responsibilities and goals are concerned, but it always feels like there's a mental handoff switching to this one context.

fifilura 2y ago

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 sign it is time to try something else. AI will simply refine your skillset. A backend programmer will have more time to think about architecture, a data engineer/scientist will have more time to think about maths. Or in essence "what am I trying to achieve". And it is up to you to step up to it. I rather think of this generation with hordes of "coders, writing code" as an anomaly.

throwaway2037 2y ago
> can't tell a difference between an animation at 25fps vs 50 fps Is this commercially relevant for 99% of UIs?
- fifilura 2y ago
  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.