I've been going through some changes
For the last couple of months, I have not been on any project full-time, and I'm struggling to find positions that are hiring for remote frontend developers with my expertise. This has been a bit...weird. For the last 10 years, recruiters have been sending me messages through Linkedin pretty much non-stop! But now, business truly has slowed down.
What does this mean?
Times they are'a changin'. I've long considered myself an AI-sceptic. When it first started becoming a "thing", with early ChatGPT and Copilot, it honestly did not produce the results the people marketing it were trying to tell us it did. If you let an agent do what it wanted, it would almost always make the codebase worse and less maintainable. Autocomplete felt like it was frying my brain, because I would start a line of code and then sit and stare at my screen for the LLM to complete it, then get frustrated by the options it gave me. I could feel my skills deteriorating, so I stopped using autocomplete and started only using LLMs for research and concrete problems as side dialogs. But there have been advancements in the field, and many of my previous assumptions have been proven wrong.
Why did I even enter this field?
I've been thinking lately. Why did I really enter this field? Do I love it for the tactile feeling of pressing keys on my keyboard and producing mountains of code? Or do I love it because it lets me solve real problems for people? The more and more I've thought about this, the more I've started to realize it's the problem solving I love. Admitting to myself that the years I've spent learning and truly understanding deeper syntax now aren't nearly as valuable as they once were is... rough. Obviously. But I've also realized that they weren't wasted either, they've given me...
- Real insight and understanding into how real applications are structured, function and communicate.
- Problem-solving skills that I utilize regularly for stuff that isn't code
- The vocabulary to work on and read about pretty much anything related to the web
- The ability to keep working on a project even if I'm out of tokens
- A nice stash of $$$ that has helped me get through my 20s.
- A much better foundation than most people that are building web apps today