fake Senior devs, Juniors loosing passion

Hi folks, 

Let’s start with the news:

1. The job market is flooded with “fake Senior devs”

A friend of mine is an engineering manager.

She told me despite people complaining about the market being tough — they are finding it incredibly difficult to hire competent engineers.

Most devs she is interviewing are using AI to create a Senior resume full of the right buzzwords.

But, when she digs deeper... 

Their knowledge proves to be extremely shallow!

They know useCallback and useMemo.

But have no idea about real web performance (Critical Rendering Path, Core Vitals, etc)

They can’t tell you how React Suspense actually works. 

Or the pros and cons of TypeScript and Microfrontends.

In her case, it took them forever to fill up vacancies, despite the market being supposedly full of developers looking for work. 

As it turns out 10 years of writing React components doesn’t make you a Senior. Deep technical knowledge and solid understanding of the web it’s ecosystem is what you need.

2. AI is making Senior devs rich (and Juniors poor)

Many Senior freelance devs in our community are getting requests from companies which sound like this…

“We used AI to build this, but now it doesn’t work. Can you fix it?”

Turns out they “vibe coded” a huge spaghetti codebase… 

And missed things like security, performance and code quality. 

So you get tons of repeated code, overengineered functions, and useless dead code that could have been abstracted in a library (or worse, never written).

This great news for “real” Senior devs.

They are busier than ever.

On the flip side, Bogdan and I are noticing some Junior are loosing their passion. 

For them, programming is passive.

Is asking ChatGPT or Cursor AI to do it for you. 

It is not about creativity, nor thinking. But about shortcuts and dopamine shots.

In a way I feel sorry for them. 

They might never get to experience the endless developer struggle of trying to get your code to work... By hand. With only Stack Overflow answers to help you out.

Which brings me to the third point:

3. React is not killing web innovation, AI slop is

An article went viral a few weeks ago.

Claiming that due to the popularity of React... Developers are making it the default option when it comes to building frontend apps. 

They don’t even think about pros, and cons.

Which is killing frontend innovation. 

I disagree.

First of all, React becoming more established is actually a good thing. It gives people a standardized solution that they can default on. 

We need more of that, specially in the frontend. 

Having 3 new frameworks trying to re-invent the wheel every year wasn’t healthy, either.

Wanna know what’s really killing innovation on the web?

Freakin’ AI garbage. 

Check any good tech talks on Web Performance or Browser optimization… Most of them are from 2017 or 2019! 

What happens after?

LLMs, ChatGPT and AI coding sucks all attention from us and the community. 

And it doesn’t seem to stop yet. 

So I guess we are looking at a “lost decade” for software development and the web. 

It is called “enshittification” and is affecting the whole ecosystem. 

You get the same old features, worse performance…. But hey, you can chat with AI about it! 

What the heck, folks? 

This bubble is about to pop cuz it ain’t helping anyone besides maybe Nvidia and Open AI shareholders.

Which will be the most affected when sh**t hits the fan.

You know who won’t be affected?

The software devs out there who saw through the smoke and actually kept improving their skills. 

And is exactly what Bogdan and I can help you with… 

Check it out here! 

Also, new YouTube video on Senior Frontend Concepts:

https://youtu.be/tHbrjCtNx7Q?si=M4kllcwkkC6SwCjE

That’s it for today folk 🙂

Peace! 

Dragos

P.S. Following your suggestions, I am going to make this newsletter a more alive... Expect updates about what Bogdan and I are working on (and talking about). Please let me know how you find it :)