Ask HN: Pursuing career as Front-End Developer. Should I pivot? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Pursuing career as Front-End Developer. Should I pivot?

6 pointsspookybones3 comments

I'm 37, and I've been brushing up on my front-end dev skills in order to get back into the industry after five years off to pursue my own business. My business pays my bills, but little else. I'm considering winding it down.

Before it, I satisfied small and mid-sized clients as a front-end contractor with my html/css/jquery/bootstrap along with design skills (I'm good with photoshop, sketch, illustrator and can make logos, presentations, and pdfs, etc.) I had no trouble getting consistent work. Unfortunately, most of my clients have moved on to bigger organizations, and I lost a back-end developer I frequently worked with to covid.

Now, half a year prior to our collective realization that AI really will change the industry along with massive layoffs, I started going deeper with javascript and am learning react, node, and tailwind. Also, a little figma and was considering webflow.

Unlike a lot of you, I'm not already in the industry, but trying to get in. The timing probably couldn't be worse. I know definitive answers aren't out there. But, would you recommend I maintain a steady course or is it likely going to be a waste of my time? If the latter, any suggestions?

"As a programmer I just copy and paste stuff from StackOverflow". This has been a meme for a long time... But SO and Google haven't killed programming jobs.

I predict (and this prediction is worth what you've paid for it), that ChatGPT and the AIs will be a good thing for programmers. If you can figure out how to work effectively with ChatGPT and Copilot and the like, smaller teams can deliver outsized results. Smaller companies can afford to do bigger things. More demand.

The Industrial Revolution didn't kill the craftsman, the craftsman started building the tooling, or designing the products or making the things that industry is bad at.

The AI is good at giving you Legos bricks. There's still a lot of room for people to plug those bricks together in new ways.

It sounds like you're in a good position, with your history, for being able to leverage the AI, because you likely know enough to be able to guide the AI when it's off in the weeds. I think that's going to become important.

My 13yo son, however, he's got a huge interest and aptitude for computers and programming, but he doesn't have the background to know when the AI is in the weeds, or when the components the AI gives him have subtle problems. Heck, he doesn't even know to ask the AI to write tests for him... This is where I'm trying to guide him.

AI is not nearly advanced enough even with GPT 4 that I would tell someone to not get into frontend dev.

There’s super cool demos like with the guy feeding in an image of a site and the model generating functional code to match the requirements, those are crazy cool and I get the worry there but when you actually use these models (I’m a full-stack dev btw) you quickly realize that they aren’t going to take your job anytime soon. Even when they do start taking significant parts of our jobs, frontend devs will likely just become people who use models. You still have to be the chatter with chat gpt, and most non-dev people couldn’t even draw up a simple wireframe of an actually functional site.

Its really good at helping learn new stuff.

I think that's the skill I would work on. Trying to get clients and help them get stuff done while using ChatGPT to help you.

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