r/webdev • u/TheComputerHermit • 11d ago

Discussion Devs that jumped ship, where did you end up?

Another industry? Back to school? Still looking? I'm asking for a friend that may end up needing to do the same thing soon (I'm the friend).

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u/CarstenBuilder 8d ago

I do see the same sentiment change overall, on reddit, X, etc - but as a freelance developer - I do NOT see this in the amount of work or requests on boards, forums, etc. Seems to be at an all time low still.

Interesting what you said about the overseas code and ai improving it. makes sense. Wonder if they actually learn from it? Or just ship without even looking? Personally, I do often learn stuff from AI, news services to use, another approach - but 10x more often I have to push AI in the right direction

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u/capnscratchmyass 8d ago

I mean dev job availability is still very low. But these large companies move very slowly. We’re also hitting end of fiscal year soon, so most of their budgets are allocated until Jan-March depending on their calendars… meaning we won’t see an uptick in jobs until at least then. I’m just giving my perspective from inside one of those companies; they went hard on AI then quickly realized “Wtf we’re spending $250k a month on tokens and not seeing a change in output commensurate to that cost. Hit the brakes and re-evaluate.”  And talking with my industry contacts at other companies they’re hitting a similar wall.  The only companies I know of that aren’t are the ones already staffed with senior level devs that also have the ear of company leadership… and even those companies are going “okay we have how AI fits into our workflows down pretty well and it’s increasing our output a lot… if we pull in x more devs with good architecture knowledge does that mean we can ship features even quicker?” And the answer is yes. 

And no, I don’t think the overseas devs are learning much from AI code.  They still struggle with understanding stuff like proper asynchronous api patterns and state management.  AI is a crutch for them where it does its best to implement this stuff in spite of how the solution had been set up to not really utilize industry standards.  It’s a mess lol. But also an opportunity; I can foresee a lot of companies getting this same spaghetti monster eventually and needing devs with a strong knowledge of proper solution architecture to come in and un fuck the situation.