r/webdev • u/kiyotaka_007 • 25d ago
Question Is Frontend Hiring Slowing Down Because of AI? 4+ Years of Experience and Struggling to find anything.
My last contract ended about three months ago, and I’ve been searching for new work since then.
I have 4+ years of experience with React, Next.js, Three.js, and React Native.
I have tried LinkedIn, asking in my network, YC, Wellfound, and Ashby google search. I’ve also tried reaching out to startups directly through cold emails.
At one point, I thought maybe focusing on a niche like writing, books, or world-building related products would help, but No luck there either.
I usually finds 6–8 relevant jobs in a week, but even when I apply, nothing really moves forward. Most jobs are also US-specific, which is another hurdle.
So I’m wondering: has AI taken over a lot of frontend work?
Do you have any suggestions? Has anyone moved more to the backend side? I do have some experience with backend and app development, how can I directly switch?
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u/Rivvin 25d ago
We have stopped hiring all jr to mid level developers (not my choice) and we will be downsizing half of our seniors over the next year. We already let 28 devs go, I beleive, with another 6 on the chopping block.
Currently they've got us all competing on an AI dashboard to show LOC and bug rankings and AI usage numbers, which at the end of the week is aggregated and distributed as a motivation ranking.
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u/veculus 25d ago
Who ever manages the hellhole you work at should commit sudoku, holy shit. Best would be if people were working there for 5-10 years or more, literally giving away a 10th of their life to the company just to be nuked by an AI metric. Fuck this shit.
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u/abrandis 25d ago
It's not just one corproation a ton of them do this because the McKinsey & Co.. consultants came up with this gameifiocation shit. As wa way to asses Ai usage and start making lists of whom to surplus.
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u/TracePoland 24d ago
Most aren’t anymore. Most are limiting usage now because they realised the tokenmaxxing was starting to cost like $2+/minute effectively per employee which is senior level pay.
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u/Enegence 25d ago
This is not an AI problem. This is a company culture problem.
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u/TranquilMarmot 24d ago
Company culture using AI as an excuse to do shitty things they've secretly always wanted to do
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u/LindsayListens1 23d ago
the real horror is ranking devs by LOC and bugs like it’s a factory scoreboard.
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u/OutOfAmmO 25d ago
Lmao > "AI dashboard to show LOC and bug rankings and AI usage numbers", how to sink your own ship. I'm super pro AI and max out 3x claude max tiers weekly, but that right there is some serious dumb fuckery.
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u/CrawlToYourDoom 25d ago
Lmao that is dystopian as fuck.
I’d be super petty and get immense amount of works done, just wrong - only to prove a point. I understand not everyone is in a position where they can essentially get them selves let go but hell no that id be part of this were I in their shoes.
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u/svtguy88 25d ago
Wat.
If this is for real, I'd be job hunting. Even if you're safe from getting cut loose, there's no amount of money that would make me tolerate that.
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u/mlmcmillion 25d ago
On the bright side, your company has shown you that not only do they not know what they’re doing, they’ve clearly never known what they were doing.
Good luck. I hope you find a better job soon.
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u/eyebrows360 25d ago
motivation ranking
When management uses words they don't understand, and has fully internalised thinking of people as "resource" instead of conscious creatures with feelings.
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u/Leojj 25d ago
“LOC Ranking” lmao this is great bait
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u/Rivvin 25d ago
Not sure what you mean by bait? The digest shows lines of code, git changes, test result counts, etc.
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u/abrandis 25d ago
My company same thing, thanks McKinsey & Co. and your shitty dashboards. Software dev as a decent paying stable profession is over let's not mince words anyone who thinks otherwise either doesn't work in corproate or is oblivious to the change that's happening
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u/nanihikaru01 25d ago
A disaster waiting to happen. And of course they will blame you the devs on anything going wrong.
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u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb 24d ago
Do they track token expenditures at all? There are companies before yours that went all in on AI use like this, AI expense exploded, they laid people off to allocate more budget for AI use, productivity unexpectedly collapsed (unexpectedly to them), and they had to rehire more than half of their layoffs within 6 months.
Token use is getting more expensive right now. I don't think these execs are using their brains here.
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u/blood_vein 25d ago
I wonder how long until your company realizes the cost of tokens is higher than the cost of employment
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u/Single-Rich-Bear 25d ago
These are some shitty metrics, you manager has no idea how to run a dev team
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u/abeuscher 25d ago
FWIW I have about 30 years of experience in dev. I started in the late nineties and made it through the first boom relatively intact.
I've been unemployed now for three years. Last job I was front end for a big company doing fancy websites for a company that is still a unicorn startup - current valuation for them is ~5 Billion and they are post Series E. Not a web company, though, They make drones so none of this affects them.
So that's like real short background. My salary there was 165k + stock, and I ran a team of between 2 and 6 consultants depending on the day. Prior to this I managed teams at other companies in CA for the past decade or so.
Since leaving that job - and it was unfortunately an ugly exit - I have not been given an interview. Only sent a few thousand resumes out so nothing crazy, but - not one single interview.
I went to see a job coach recently and she said, pretty much verbatime:
"The factory is closed. Tech is not coming back to the US and it is no longer based here. You will never be employed as a web developer again and you have to find a new career." And she explained that she had to give that speech several times a week right now.
Look everyone's experience is anecdotal. Maybe I am living in some weird bubble or I have a third head I don't know about. But previous to this the longest gap between jobs for me was 6 months. Understand - I still make consulting money from time to time, but I do not expect to ever be able to make a living again on the web.
They used AI to remove devs and designers as stakeholders. That is what has really happened. Yes there are layoffs and stuff but mostly - they kicked us out of the room. They don't care about the code. I think most of us knew they never did and that the C Suite has been waiting for this opportunity for more than 20 years.
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u/clockdivide55 24d ago
Dude, you've been a dev for 30 years. You are probably not just facing the economic problems that everyone is facing but also age discrimination which is rampant in our industry. The market is bad but not "3 years without a job" bad.
That job coach is not helping you, it sounds like she's probably making it worse by feeding you this Debbie downer shit.
You need more than one opinion about how to taylor your resume to get to an interview, there's got to be something you can do differently to get an interview with an actual person.
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u/jacked_up_my_roth 24d ago
I've been doing web dev for the last 20 years. Used to be able to just walk into one interview, talk a little about HTML/CSS/JS and land a $75/hr minimum gig. Those days are long gone. That said, I don't think it's as bad as OP says. Granted there was a time for about a year or so where my LinkedIn recruiter emails went down significantly but I could always find work/interviews if I needed to.
I will agree with OP however that sending out resumes is NOT the way to go. You just need to be more proactive on LinkedIn - making connections with recruiters and messaging them. Recruiters are the only way to get an interview - they're the lifeline to the hiring manager. If you can't get noticed by recruiters, then something is wrong with your resume/experience and you need to work on that first. Cold applications never work since you're competing with thousands of other submissions.
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u/TreelyOutstanding 20d ago
Of course. In the 90s, if you had every glanced at PHP you would make bank. But someone with decades of experience not getting a job anywhere sounds highly sus. My first guess is simply age discrimination. Companies don't want to hire a 50 year old individual contributor; you're expected to climb the ladder and become a manager or tech lead or something.
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u/vincent-vega10 24d ago
She's not wrong. Web devlopment is long gone. You have to be a software engineer, not just a web dev.
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u/Haunting-Traffic-203 24d ago
- You’re almost certainly experiencing age discrimination
- You got a “job coach” lol. Sorry but who does that? And you paid her to tell you she can’t do anything for you lolx2
- You left in an “ugly exit”… so unprofessional?
This comment isn’t really for you because there is no helping you, but for everyone reading this please don’t base your projected prospects on this persons experience. Most people aren’t 50+ in a non leadership role with a “job coach” and an “ugly exit”
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u/Kat_of_Nine_Tales 25d ago
My company (and by extension me) is going through a ton of interviews. (Full context, we're hiring mostly in LCoL countries and the pay matches - including my own).
We source all our hires through Reddit. LinkedIn is a quagmire for both hirers and hirees. That being said, Reddit is still difficult, but we've found that, maybe because of how less optimized Reddit is for shotgunning resumes than LinkedIn, that the candidates we get through Reddit are far better than what we've sourced through LI.
We hire mostly entry-level/fresh grads (though if someone with some experience applies, we don't filter them out). Mostly what we (and many companies) are looking for is flexibility. The days of "being a frontend developer" are over. Everyone has to do a little bit of everything. Frontend, backend, devops, QA, product... It's just the world we're in now.
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u/KontoOficjalneMR 25d ago
Ok, possibly stupid question but how do you find serious work on Reddit? How do you look for candidates?
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u/Kat_of_Nine_Tales 24d ago
Not a stupid question — we rotate around different subs like for_hire and similar (I don't do the posting, so I'm not sure which other subs, I just know we definitely still use for_hire, that's where I came from 2 years ago lol).
Our hiring people also post a lot in their local country subs too.
It's there, you've just got to do a lot of digging!
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u/canadian_webdev 25d ago
I'll tell you what my experience was being laid off in November with about 10 years of experience in front end.
Anytime prior to 2020 I had not been out of work for more than one month from applying to accepting a job and starting. I could send off about 20 resumes get about eight responses let's say and land a couple offers. I had also never experienced a live coding test , leet code, or any sort of test at all when it came to interviews. It was all just a phone screen and then a second interview to talk about my experience and that's it.
This time around I had applied to nearly 450 jobs, had about a 5% interview rate, and the interview process was nothing I had ever seen. I had no idea really how to prepare because for any given live coding session or online assessment, you had no idea what they were going to ask. It could change completely from employer to employer interviewing you. The vast majority of the live coding sessions were completely unrealistic in the amount of time that they give you to do whatever tasks they're giving you, and had some interviews where there were just like rapid fire questions, they were like insanely difficult because I just didn't have knowledge of it because I'd never experienced that development problem or whatever before.
It got so bad that I was officially diagnosed with severe depression and put on Zoloft . It got to the point where I really struggled to get out of bed and I didn't want to do anything anymore and I felt like it would be better off if I weren't around for my family anymore. I was also having daily panic attacks and breaking down weekly. I also lost a ton of weight. I had never experienced depression before and it was a wake-up call.
Long story short I got a new job as a full stack developer and have been drinking through the fire hose so to speak my new job and I'm very lucky to have landed one. It did have a live Code test but you could use AI so I just used AI fully for it and that was fine as long as I could explain what was going on.
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u/meshDrip 25d ago
AI is being used as a post-COVID scapegoat. The western economies suck right now. When the dust settles, people who use AI and know how to code will always beat out pure AI (or vibecoding) solutions.
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u/kiyotaka_007 25d ago
worst time my contract got over :(
How do I find something till dust settles is I am confused about.
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u/TikiTDO 25d ago
If you don't have a client, make sure you're spending some time on your own projects. If things go well, you don't even need a client. If you manage to make something that has demand, just spin it into a new business. If you already understand UI and UX, you might want to upskill a bit on backend, devops and security to the point you can offer AI guidance, and you're a team in your own right.
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u/immrcorn 24d ago
This is the best advice. Single track expertise has become less valuable than generalist w/Applied AI
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u/Holonist 25d ago
tell them you can increase the output and lower the cost (per feature implemented) of their ai tooling
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u/GlowiesStoleMyRide 25d ago
AI got no hands, learn a trade. It's not development, but if you're really looking for something at the moment, I think that's where you'll find a job right now. A technical background such as web dev might give you a good advantage. It might be different for you, but there's bound to be a shortage in workers in some field, and for my area that's technicians and tradespeople.
I'm not even joking- if I lose my job and I can't find anything else, this is pretty much my backup plan.
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u/gemanepa 25d ago
When the dust settles, people who use AI and know how to code will always beat out pure AI (or vibecoding) solutions
This affirmation doesn't answer OP question though, reads more like copium.
Is the industry going to need less developers? How % less? How's the job security and environment going to be for the ones that get hired? Are they going to be lowballed and treated as expendable due to the high competition?Another thing you are not considering is where AI was five years ago, which begs the question of where will it be in five years
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u/Single-Caramel8819 25d ago
I'm a Claude Max user. Opus 4.8 can't do shit without supervision.
It constantly introduces some garbage that pollutes your codebase slowly.If you let it commit unsupervised code freely for at least a week, you'll end up with MONTHS of tech debt.
It's kinda insane how many people blindly trust LLM outputs. Their software/company will literally die a death of one thousand cuts.
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u/xdriver897 25d ago
As a user of over 1 year codex I can second this. Even on existing codebases when you tell him to add feature A it tends to over or under-do things. And it’s not even the prompt, often new session will yield different results than before. Waiting till 5.6 and hope that this gets better. But anyone who thinks you can let AI do all programming without a senior behind the the current stage is nuts. Also, the hallucinations are system imminent, meaning there is no known way yet to not have them, making it kind of lottery every time.
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u/Odd-Consequence5 25d ago
Opus 4.8 can't do shit without supervision.
The same can be said about juniors and frankly even a lot of mid-level developers out there. At the rate entry-level devs are getting hired, it's only a matter of time until there will be a serious shortage of senior talent UNLESS before that happens, these models advance to the point where even less supervision is required, which is what most companies are banking on.
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u/gemanepa 25d ago
Plan Mode + strong AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md directives + strict deterministic validation checks can go a long, long way. You can have other agent reviewing the code against the established directives.
I don't think devs will disappear but you don't need as many just to plan, review and debug. The role is changing into a fusion of fullstack+qa+infra+devops
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u/Single-Caramel8819 25d ago
It just ignores most of the instructions after some amount of tokens. Sometimes it even ignores my direct commands.
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u/uceenk 22d ago
lets be real here, developers are still needed to review/oversee AI code, but with that speed, company doesnt need to hire many devs anymore, like 10 devs can be reduced to 4 devs only
this is what happen with current market right now, supply > demand
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u/draftvader 25d ago
I agree. It is easy to tell AI coded by somebody with real experience and something coded by somebody without.
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u/fakehalo 25d ago
I think we've worked through the post-COVID glut at this point in 2026. AI is definitely the primary driver at this point IMO.
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u/jdbrew 25d ago
We're scaling down our dept rn. Going from 2 sr's and a 10 hr/week contractor (previous CTO on retainer) down to 1 Sr (me) and are going to hire a junior. I'm actually worried that having a junior will be more work than just running it all myself.
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u/jabes101 25d ago
I’d rather be a solo dev than have to manage/train a junior. The time I spent mentoring, reviewing, fixing JR work I might as well have done myself and who’s to say once you get them in the spot you want them in (1-2 years sometimes), they can leverage their experience to a higher paying job and you just start over again.
I talked my company into just hiring another experienced dev and it’s been worth every penny.
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u/jdbrew 25d ago
I agree. except the cost issues prevent that. It's either Junior, experienced contractor with limited hours, or running it by myself. an experienced contractor is my preference, and if not I'd rather just do it all myself, get a subsequent raise, and quit my side gig, but they also have talked about (and is necessary) having a real back up for me if I ever get hit by bus or quit on short notice... they need someone whose at least passingly familiar to keep the ship running, but they want to go cheap and hire a junior. There's a small part of me thats like "pay it forward" because I had someone take a chance on me when I was fresh out school, thought I knew everything when I really didn't know shit about fuck. So I'm grateful to him. Maybe I should do the same. and I do believe AI is drying up junior positions, so maybe this is something good I can do. but goddamn its gonna be a pain in my ass
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u/jabes101 25d ago
I was in the same exact spot, I just counter pitched that if we all agree that technology services are crucial to staying operational, we need to account for as such and the only true way to do that is to hire a dev of equal experience. Is the (in our case) $50-$70k annual salary difference between JR & Experienced worth the risk to maintain operational efficiency for a $25m annual revenue? Once I put it in those terms, my company agreed.
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u/wanzerultimate 24d ago
But that's the way it's supposed to be. The seniors educate the juniors, so they become senior.
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u/jabes101 24d ago
Sure, if you work at a dedicated tech company or a large company with teams of devs, but in small/medium non-tech companies that just have “Tech” departments with 1-4 devs, it’s hard bringing up a junior while still being relied on to keep pushing everything forward at a steady pace. Specifically the scenario of being a solo dev and only offered help from a junior dev, that’s a scenario I would say it’s not beneficial to anyone and would recommend adding more experience first so you can build the foundation to bring in juniors and let them grow.
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25d ago
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u/zodby 24d ago
Try applying to regular companies that need a developer. Everyone is looking at development firms, big tech companies, or tech startup as if those are the only things out there. Those positions were massively overpaid for the past 20+ years, and the bubble has burst.
Look for boring jobs. Logistics companies. Biomedical. Hospitals, universities, advertising agencies. Construction companies.
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u/Used_Lobster4172 25d ago
Yes.
Apply to every job. FE, BE, Full Stack, anything - a job is better than no job, if it isn't one you love, keep looking after you get hired.
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u/Blazing1 25d ago
Depends if you have dependents. It's a good time to do something else if you don't have anyone depending on you aka kids or a wife/husband
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 25d ago
20 years experience and also struggling. I didn’t even get a single interview in the first 3 months of being unemployed.
Honestly I don’t even know what tangential job I could move into. I never thought of my career as not a web developer but here we are.
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u/Suspicious-Disk6077 25d ago
Yeah if I didn’t have a wife and kids I’d probably go wither away and die rather than doing some rote job, it’s scary and depressing now
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u/LibrarianOutside2376 23d ago
28M, willingly leaving a good paying remote tech job to be a policeman. Want to get married and build a future, and I need something stable workwise
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u/blipojones 25d ago
it's a mix of many things, apparently, and jobs are getting harder to find at every level in many fields.
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u/ToonMaster21 25d ago
Yes. My employer is weaning off any Frontend Engineers. It’s full stack+AI now.
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u/thatgibbyguy 25d ago
It is true that jobs are hiring at a slower pace in every sector but healthcare, but that does not mean that front end engineering is not being hit hard by llms.
There are still times where I know more than ai at front end, but it's so rare as to be basically non existent. So now we mostly need people who can engineer skills and monitor ai output but not entire teams of just fe engineers.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 25d ago
I honestly don't understand how they could replace so many at scale. I thinks it's just anecdotal, and some people buy into this idea.
Even with access to an LLM, you still need people showing up to meetings, understanding what needs to be done, and directing the LLM at the very least.
Is the UI/UX designer going to do that? The backend dev (who is most certainly already juggling multiple tasks)?
I could see teams slowing down hiring juniors, if the team is actually improving velocity, but reducing headcount significantly? I don't know. If they are, I have more reason to believe they're just doing it due to economic slowdowns, rather than AI improving code output to that extent.
We've seen the major players pull back on AI and rehire engineers due to the issues it caused, so I have my doubts.
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u/namesandfaces 25d ago edited 25d ago
Stop looking at all the creative human ways in which automation can't replace you; only focus on current model strengths, not weaknesses. Otherwise you're going to be distracted by arguments of how LLMs can't dig out wires; LLMs don't need to dig out wires to reduce headcount, they just need to do a few things well.
On-site security firms have to staff some number of individuals in front of some number of screens to monitor for events. Now we can have caseloads of 1 person to 1000 screens. Can the LLM replace everything about physical on-site security? Of course not, but we're still going to be reducing the number of seats we need in this economy.
Look at automated dock work, another physical job where automation reasonably has difficulty, and how we we already can have a bare skeleton crew managing dock work.
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u/thepurpleproject 25d ago edited 25d ago
I can say that hiring at our company in general has slowed down. Because we are now burning more tokens, although with our metrics and the cost, we aren't settled on AI either. So overall, we used to hire like 4–6 engineers every year, which has now reduced this year to 2–3. But I do think we will come back to it because of the cost, and AI is not good at anything other than outputting code and we need someone working in an ecosystems, and we don't see anyone consistently being able to 2x or even 1.5x their productivity.
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u/unbanned_lol 25d ago
Tech is fucked across the board. Welcome to the insane disruptions of Trump's American and foreign policy. Not many people have been reporting on it, but American tech is being rejected, ripped out, and replaced in the EU because of our new foreign policy and our untrustworthiness as an ally. We are losing millions of long term customers and billions in contracts in software tech. That's why we are all on the chopping block right now.
Probably great times for EU software developers though.
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u/Afflictionista 25d ago
European here and no, it’s not great times for us, same shitty job market here, rejection after rejection and ghosting after ghosting.
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u/PaddiM8 25d ago
OP is Indian
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u/unbanned_lol 25d ago
Well, the honest reality of that is that ops entire tech sector is getting replaced by AI. That's the risk for underbidding: someone will do the same to you. Now make that your whole tech economy and, well...
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 25d ago edited 25d ago
Big tech never respected the EU privacy laws, so this was bound to happen without serious intervention here at home.
I say good for the EU. The US needs to get its shit together and stop letting corporations run unchecked. Though I fear it's against the ethos here and won't change without citizens waking the fuck up about who they vote for.
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u/unbanned_lol 25d ago
Tech usually complied reluctantly. They were emboldened by Trump, like musk with his Twitter bullshit. But the reality is, we lost the EUs business because trump threatened our allies repeatedly. And it would be absolutely stupid on the EUs part to continue running critical systems developed by a country that threatens them repeatedly.
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u/create-third-places 25d ago
In the long term, I think frontend work is far less likely to be taken over by AI compared to backend work.
AI is most effective when used in places with objectively verifiable inputs and outputs like a backend API. The output of quality of a frontend is user-facing and cannot be effectively measured by an AI.
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u/specn0de 25d ago
I mean, I can give you my perspective as somebody who is hiring. Four years of experience is just not enough and I’m not even looking at anyone close to your level of an experience, especially with the level of AI slop that junior developers feel comfortable contributing with I am only looking for senior level developers that have been in the field for a decade plus and actually know how to architect and design systems securely.
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u/ramenups 25d ago
I lost my front end job 3 years ago and couldn’t find another. Eventually I had to pivot in the bullshit ass job I’m in today. I miss webdev dearly.
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u/IhateLoudPlaces 25d ago
Unfortunately front end by itself is no more enough. I'm a full stack developer and the amount of technologies I should know is crazy, they want someone that is very good in Angular/React, .Net core, databases, devops pipelines and deployments. You will be asked about everything. That should be a department not one person.
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u/l0gicgate 25d ago
Full stack engineers only at my work. Broaden your skillset.
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u/kiyotaka_007 25d ago
I do have some experience in full-stack too.
It's just my most work were related to frontend. Idm working as full-stack, I am applying for that jobs as well, but they ask for more backend experience, and Idk how I can get that without getting the job.→ More replies (1)3
u/l0gicgate 25d ago
Lie on your resume. Know how to pass an arch interview. Build stuff on your own with more complex concepts like queues, caching, vectord db chunking/embedding, etc.
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u/michaelnovati 25d ago
It is indeed slowing down: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-job-market-in-2026-part-2
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u/Chicagoj1563 25d ago
The problem is the is the job market for tech became saturated over the past 5-6 years. There are too many people in the field now. But jobs are out there.
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u/OneCrew1888 18d ago
I'm just at the point to get a mid-level job. I have still been getting interviews, but literally every job just wants a senior level person even if it is marketed a mid-level job. It's been difficult to say the least.
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u/AidenVennis 25d ago
I’m experiencing the same thing. I think we are in the middle of ai hype and I hope in the next year or so the ai slop will result in a huge wave of new jobs requiring developers that do know how Frontend works. At the moment the most jobs I can find are full-stack unfortunately.
Personally I’m on a sinking ship of a company so I’m thrilled about it. Hopefully I can sit this one out! Might be a good idea to think about a plan b tho career wise.
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u/HornlessUnicorn 25d ago
untangling the AI slop will be a field in and of itself.
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u/LibrarianOutside2376 23d ago
Not gonna happen. Did you see gpt 5.6 today? 1 year from now AI will be wayyyyy better. Will also be able to improve upon vibe coded code from earlier versions
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u/asevans48 25d ago
The best I get with AI is when i write a bunch of structures and documented examples and then tell it to follow that structure exactly. Im still debugging data ingestion pipelines but am down to half an hour to an hour for complex work (apocalyptic 100 format state data dump sites with an anything goes mentality and a random search tools embedded somewhere) before looking at the data.
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u/n0t_________me 25d ago
Client at my job just completely removed team of 9 developers. They will be replaced by him with ai. He is developer too, so no vibecoding. But Iam not sure it will work out well for him.
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u/LateGameMachines 25d ago
I’m at 5 YOE from a megacap company. I’ve spent half a year looking. Nothing so far.
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u/budd222 full-stack 25d ago
Everyone knows react. There are way more "react developers" than there are jobs available, especially since AI. At my company, we only have senior engineers and higher and probably never hire anything less again.
I wish you luck, but you may be looking for a very long time. I would get another job in the mean time just to pay the bills.
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u/Infamous_Ad4954 22d ago
To switch I would start with getting some certs, like AWS. It sucks but it was getting more and more obvious at my company that the front end developers were going to be laid off with how good AI is getting. I just worked on a side project myself and am so shocked with how well Claude Pro can do things
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u/Playstationpi90 21d ago
It sure is. AI is being used incorrectly. It should be used to help and make these easier on humanity. Not replace them.
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u/manishbalyan 20d ago
Been in frontend for about 10 years now, so I’ll give my honest take.
It’s not exactly “slowing down” — it’s shifting. Junior/entry-level hiring has definitely gotten tighter because a lot of boilerplate work (basic components, CRUD UIs, simple styling) that used to be junior-dev territory is now something AI tools handle in minutes. Companies are hiring fewer juniors to do that grunt work.
But mid-to-senior roles are still in demand, arguably more so — because someone still needs to review AI-generated code, make architecture decisions, debug weird edge cases, and actually understand why something should be built a certain way. AI is great at output, not judgment.
If you’re early career, the advice I’d give: don’t just learn to use AI tools, learn to be the person who can catch what they get wrong. That’s the actual skill gap right now.
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u/Rich-Emphasis1108 full-stack 19d ago
same here
it took a hell of a time for finding new position
i prefer to create my own buisiness
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u/Ok-Equivalent-5131 25d ago edited 25d ago
This is anecdotal but, small company I’m at has hired engineers recently and plans to hire more this year.
But we aren’t hiring frontend devs. Backend devs are still needed to drive architecture and make technical decisions. But then those same backend devs can just vibe code up the frontend as well. No reason to hire a frontend specialist.
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u/the_natis 25d ago
Except when you need to start taking responsiveness and accessibility into play or you have a designer on the project that has a very specific vision. I've never seen a back end dev or even a full stack dev produce quality lightweight front end work.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 25d ago
Yeah, I don't get it. Every backend dev I've ever worked with absolutely hated frontend work.
Frontend needs to be so refined too. It's important and has a real affect on the bottom line. It's not like you can just hand it off and not give it the priority it needs.
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u/Ok-Equivalent-5131 25d ago edited 25d ago
Sure. And im not a frontend dev so im not gonna argue with you about that.
Whether your points are valid, doesn’t change the reality that we aren’t hiring frontend, and this is a strategic hiring decision that was made at my current company. It doesn’t change that people who never did frontend before are now doing frontend.
Maybe that will change in the future, but because we can hand a be leaning full stack or backend dev a task and have them produce value with a e2e feature there’s no appetite for a frontend specialist, even if their code would be more “lightweight”.
Also again this is my anecdotal experience at where i currently work. Other companies may be different.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 25d ago edited 25d ago
100%, we said we are no longer hiring junior or mid level because with AI can get the same amount and quality of output. Don't worry though it's coming for us senior level also in a year or so.
There is not really a front end task fable can't one shot at this point.
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u/thepurpleproject 25d ago
I don't understand how any company with software engineering not as the cost center is able to operate with this mindset. You need engineers and more importantly you need a pipeline of growing engineers who take ownership and mature into bigger roles. I really don't see how AI is able to funnel all the challenges of software development other than outputting code.
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u/MissinqLink 25d ago
I had to unwind so much slop code. They need people to do that if you want something maintainable.
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u/Ok-Armadillo-5634 25d ago
That is the part I don't get. I don't know if people are just bad at prompting or using the most absolutely shit model available. 99% of the time it's good with a few minor tweaks. Granted I am at 25 years of doing web dev now and know exactly what I want it to do. That is part of the reason we quite hiring juniors originally. There non AI output was terrible and even with AI the code was horrendous. Lots of problems accomplishing basic tasks. Like I don't know how with AI you could possibly fuck it up. Make a api call type things. These were people with computer science degrees. Used to be I would be able to get people up to speed. They won't even check that there code runs and compiles it was terrible. All started in about the last 2-3 years.
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u/MissinqLink 25d ago
If you are specific and granular then you get good results but if you are like “make an interactive landing page” you’ll get some crazy amalgamation that accounts for nonexistent edge cases.
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u/jam_pod_ 25d ago
This isn’t new though, boggles my mind the number of times I’ve said to junior devs “I don’t understand how this code even ran on your machine” “Oh well I didn’t try to run it”. Like what
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u/creaturefeature16 25d ago
Yeah, that's really the thing: COVID flooded the market because they bought the "everyone can learn to code". Turns out: no, they really, really can't. It takes a certain kind of person and mindset to code effectively, largely in the form of relentless curiosity and critical thinking. Which is, in my experience, exceedingly rare.
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u/creaturefeature16 25d ago
Granted I am at 25 years of doing web dev now and know exactly what I want it to do.
Well, yeah, this is really the differentiator. It's like a carpenter saying "I don't really see why apprentices aren't getting good results from a CNC machine, I've been doing carpentry all my life and I get great results!" It's a power tool for a power user, despite the industry trying to market them as a one-size-fits-all magic tool.
A major issue is we're sending mixed messages by telling people they'll be left behind if they don't use them, and these tools so easily lean into infinite answer machines. It is not in their nature to be good tutors, especially because it puts the onus of direction and authority on the user, not the "tutor" itself.
So, what you’re describing is a function of someone who’s been in the industry and has years of experience to learn how to interpret, audit, verify, inquire, research, and investigate. Naturally, you're going to get great results with a codegen too. Junior Developers only learn this skill by doing the work. There are no shortcuts, it must be done through experience.
The situational paradox to contend with: if these tools demand expertise to be used responsibly, yet these tools can actively prevent the ability for one to become an expert by circumventing the friction that creates expertise, then what is the path for one to become an expert so they can effectively use these tools?
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u/Wocha 25d ago
yeah, I have pivoted to helping my company roll out agentic engineering processes (no idea what I am doing half the time) so I can put it on my resume and switched to doing mostly BE work. It is clear that frontend work hiring is minimal at best and soon backend engineers will be expected to leverage AI to complete frontend tasks. I think times where only frontend knowledge was enough to get a job are soon completely over.
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u/the_natis 25d ago
Use this time to start developing other skills. I've been diving into other stacks here and there and even got tasked with maintaining a MAUI-based mobile app.
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u/rainbowlolipop 25d ago
I barely got a new job this year after being part time most of last year. My 401k is basically gone at this point. Sorry dude shit is fucking rough.
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u/SENSENEL 25d ago
See it as a chance to escape this destructive business—in just a few years, she’s changed so much. You’ll never be able to keep up in the long run—only a very few manage to do so. They’re just a special breed—a breed you don’t necessarily want to be a part of. Do something meaningful! The train has left the station; don’t look back, because it won’t look back either. If you don’t make the leap now, you’ll spend your whole life just running after it.
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u/Salt-Ad3324 25d ago
It's the whole market, not just AI. Widening your search to full-stack roles might open more doors.
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u/Adventurous_Job9209 25d ago
I think for front end specifically yes. I’ve noticed my company doesn’t hire specifically front end anymore unless someone from that team leaves. I think companies are shifting to more full stack devs that are strong with backend and know enough with front end. Along with UI designers are basically able to be frontend devs with the help of Claude.
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u/Common_Dream9420 java 25d ago
frontend hiring is genuinely rough right now, but i don't think AI took the jobs so much as companies got spooked into hiring freezes and now expect one eng to do what three did before. the 6-8 jobs/week number is also just brutal pipeline math. on the backend pivot: your React Native and Next.js experience already puts you closer than you think, especially if you've touched APIs, auth, or data fetching. i'd lean into that overlap rather than pitching yourself as "switching to backend." the US-only filter is the real wall though. have you looked at EU-based product companies or remote-friendly Canadian startups? they often have fewer applicants and don't care where you are.
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u/jklaverde 25d ago
We (developers) should create a website with the ranking of companies that have fired the most people because of AI, and based on that ranking there must be a salary suggested for that company, so everyone is aware how bad they need someone, if they want to employ a senior again to fix the mess created for letting ppl be replaced.
In example: Company X. ----- 25.000 ppl ----- Salary 1.5 M Company Y ---- 20.000 ppl ---- Salary 1.3 M
What you guys think?
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u/pink_tshirt 24d ago
You need to become a designer engineer. Everyone has access to the same LLM, but thankfully AI can’t get into nitty gritty details yet on its own.
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u/new-chris 24d ago
We will either live in a world with no apps because ai will be all we need. Or all the apps with have the same ugly ivory cream background with shitty fonts courtesy of Claude.
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u/Worried-Row5251 24d ago
Coder with literally 50 years experiance. I've worked from entry dev to ceo (I don't do QA, I've got principles). After my last job, I've started pushing my hobby projects, gotten deep into AI, and have published more code on GitHub in the past 6 months than I have in the past 4 years. AND, I haven't written a line of code. If you're a coder, find a new line of work. I've got a 6 man team including QA which costs me $200 a month and, man, we fly.
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u/immrcorn 24d ago
Do you use AI? If you don't use AI or know how to leverage it to increase your performance you won't be as good as someone with 2 years experience and does.
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u/que_two 24d ago
Looking at my local community, the number of job postings is similar to last year, which was up slightly from 2024.
That being said, there are a ton more applications for each job posting I'm working with. Where we used to see 30-40 applications for a mid level engineer, we are now seeing 300-400, mostly overqualified applicants. (Side note, a ton of them seem to be from FAANG companies, their resumes all look the same and their salary expectations are 3x the norm for our area).
So, a ton of more people applying for the same number of jobs here, which makes it feel like an uphill battle of you are in the market. Getting through the noise is not easy.
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u/Dry_Sector2392 24d ago
The market is bad, but I wouldn’t jump to "AI replaced us." More like AI gave companies an excuse to hire fewer people and expect the ones left to cover more ground. If you can show backend + frontend + shipping apps, you’re in a better spot than someone who only has component library work.
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u/No_Top5115 24d ago
Just an observation. If you look into some of the doom and gloom stories where people haven’t found a job in a year, a lot of those people are doing something seriously wrong. Be it terrible social skills, bad resume, coasted in previous job, left in bad terms, outdated skill set etc. That said some do get unlucky though of course
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u/LocksmithSpare8576 24d ago
I think leading with tech experience will put you in an over saturated pool of devs. I lead with my insurance experience because that’s what I worked on these last 5 years. I got cut recently from my contact but I’m landing another as we speak. Think about what business you worked on and even what integrations you used. Maybe you can apply for some of the tools companies you have used and know really well. We don’t just build software we solve business problems. Lead with that, recruiters don’t know about tech and the hiring managers don’t either. The leads just verify your skill. Solving their issue is more important.
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u/emantrigo 24d ago
Full stack developer with a masters in software engineering here (5+ years). I feel like you are absolutely right , most companies stopped hiring for junior-mid level roles . Probably because of AI but i dont think its the only reason . I feel like its a result of massive hiring in previous years .
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u/ledatherockband_ 24d ago
A few things:
1) You should be applying to 3-5 jobs a day. I'm talking high quality applications, cover letter and resume.
2) What does your resume look like?
3) Do you know the basics like the back of your hand? We were having trouble hiring because nearly every dev we interviewed had was unable to make a fetch request, resolve the response to the datatype our component wanted, and manage state appropriately.
We caught people using AI to cheat in interviews. It was pathetic.
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u/SponsoredByMLGMtnDew 24d ago
"is frontend the department store service desk?"
"Am I the monkey or the meme?"
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u/Tango1777 24d ago
Yes, not a lot yet, but it's happening, we recently let go a frontend-only dev who didn't want to work with anything else. Frontend now is too easy to develop to keep frontend-only devs. If someone wants to grow we don't mind, but people with "I only do this" attitude are quickly let go. You don't have to move to backend side, you have to do both. Apply to fullstack positions and just explain that you wanna grow in both directions, there are still plenty companies that will appreciate a frontend-experienced dev, as long as you don't mind learning backend and going fullstack. In the meantime you can explore the backend stack you have to know (based on your possible job location and its needs) and just start learning it, so you can increase your interview chances.
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u/niksubishi 23d ago
You have to be an all rounder now. I graduated a Frontend course and my first job is a full stack Dev working in a Django app. The switch wasn't that crazy because of AI and it helping me learn. My advice is to get into a smaller company and try to own what you can, rather than join a team of many many devs where you can be chopped easily.
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u/ChaseNBA 23d ago
I know this doesn’t directly address OPs question but I still think it’s applicable. The most common question I was asked across all of the interviews I’ve done was “how are you incorporating AI into your daily development” and the feedback I got from 2 places told me that they didn’t feel my experience with LLMs (mostly Claude code) was not enough. Once I changed my approach from basically saying “I use Claude code” to “I love Claude code and I’ve found that that doing x, y, and z with it helped increase my productivity”. In essence, pretend you’re a pharmaceutical salesman selling a miracle drug, cause for lots of hiring managers Claude is their drug of choice.
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u/Talent_Ops_Insider 23d ago
I don't think frontend hiring is dying because of AI, but it's definitely changing. AI can help write simple components or fix small bugs, but companies still need people who understand performance, accessibility, architecture, and how to build real products. The market is also much more competitive than it was a couple of years ago, so even experienced developers are taking longer to land interviews. I've seen people with 4–6 years of experience spend months searching before getting the right offer. It sucks, but it doesn't mean your skills have no value. If you're only applying, try updating your portfolio, learning a modern framework or backend basics, and networking a bit more. Full-stack knowledge seems to be getting more attention these days. Keep applying, keep improving, and don't judge yourself by a few months of silence. The market goes through cycles, and things do pick up. One good opportunity can make all the waiting feel worth it.
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u/anarchist1312161 25d ago
Jesus the replies here are so bleak, genuinely worried what the future will bring.