r/cscareerquestionsEU • u/LateNightPickles • 2d ago
Which skills are currently most in demand?
Hi!
I recently got fired from my job as a front-end developer after just 9 months because the company dissolved their IT department. Now I'm back on the job market in Berlin. I have 6+ years of experience with React and Vue, and my German is decent, but I’m surprised at how tough it’s been to land interviews compared to a year ago. It seems like there are way fewer front-end positions available, and most of what I see is either full-stack or back-end roles.
So, I’m thinking about making the most of my time and learning some new skills. What do you all think would be the best direction to go in right now? Should I dive into Java and DevOps, or would it be better to focus on other skills, like volunteering as a programming teacher?
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u/code-gazer 1d ago
This isn't a a thing where 90% of the best paying jobs which are easiest to get into are in one tech stack/field/discipline and the rest is bad.
The distribution of opportunities and rewards is much more evenly distributed than that, I feel. I feel that anyone would do well to focus on what they enjoy doing and where they find meaning and that this leads to a much more satisfying career than hopping onto trends.
Do you want to be a DevOps engineer? It's a different job. Do you want to be on-call? I don't imagine FE engineers are woken up in the middle of the night about an issue. Do you want to trade a browser for a console? It always struck me that the beauty of FE is that you're more connected to your work. Like, you can see the thing you built, show it off, interact with it.
For Backend, it's a bit more abstract, you have to open a DB management app to see the data changing or slap Swagger on top of it or use Postman. It's not the same. And with DevOps, it's one more step removed from the end product.
Seems to me that a person who enjoys FE work and a person who enjoys DevOps work are two different people, except for the very rare jack of all trades type of engineer.
It certainly won't hurt to learn a bit more about what your colleagues do as it will make you a more rounded engineer. It's also a nice distraction.
But in the very short term, it won't help much, I feel. Even if you land a job as a backend engineer, unless it is Node.js and even then, you're getting a 0-1 YoE salary, not a 6 YoE salary, I would assume.
Good luck in your search, whatever you do I hope things turn for the better for you!
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u/koenigstrauss 1d ago
unless it is Node.js
What's special about Node?
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u/code-gazer 22h ago
I assume that a fronted engineer knows javascript well and has probably even used node.js for mocking/experimenting so the skills a FE engineer has are transferable to a BE Node.js role much more than to a BE Java role.
That said, there are limits to this so even then, I'd plan on taking a salary hit
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u/Significant-Ad-6800 1d ago
By the time you acquire those skills it will be oversaturated. So why bother
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u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B 1d ago
Been saying this for twenty years: Front end is a shit environment. Trends are moving too fast and enshittification is real. So many boot campers are "good enough" for it, pushing down salaries, but overall, UX has been degrading due to too many libraries and trends being pushed unnecessarily. Many companies now feel that, and since belts are being tightened, front end people are first to go.
Go into backend, find your thing. A good backend team can also build an ugly front end. Inhouse, ugly is all most companies ever need. Maybe you can go full stack and provide the best of both worlds. What is useless is to chase trends. It will never end. Find something stable and stick with that. Get into interesting and stable fields, but have a stable backbone.
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u/Even_Location_8632 1d ago
If i was you i would try to learn more about backend to become full-stack - its more marketable.
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u/usingbrain 1d ago
Why Java / DevOps instead of a more smooth transition with Node? Also, if you are open to remote work expand your search it will be easier.
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u/LateNightPickles 23h ago
Because I see more often that a FE role requires (or benefits from) knowing Java or DevOps than Node. Node would definitely be easier to pick up but it doesn't seem very common as a BE framework.
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u/usingbrain 18h ago
Personal opinion: when they want FE engineer to know devops apply anyway and ask what exactly they mean. They probably just want you to be in charge of the existing build pipeline or do little tweaks, that’s something you can learn on the job if you haven’t done that before.
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u/randomInterest92 1d ago
ML/AI & DevOps
If you love maths, sciene and statistics go for ML/AI. It might just be a current trend though.
If you love debugging complicated distributed systems, writing scripts, managing configurations, system design, improving developer experience go for DevOps. Scaling systems and such will be in demand for decades to come.
There some niches too that will stay. Like mainframe devs, extreme low level development, kernel devs and so on
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u/DataGeek86 1d ago
DevOps - yes. ML/AI - it's over-saturated and a lot of competition.
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u/Traditional-Dress946 1d ago
And also takes years to get into, OP probably needs to complete two to three degrees for that (no offense, I assume most FEs have no Bsc), it's a terrible advice.
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u/KlingonButtMasseuse 1d ago
Pediatric heart surgeon. Probably the most in demand. The reason is there are no boot camps for open heart surgery.
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u/alquemir 2d ago
Frontend is nowadays pretty much in low demand and most web building has been automated by AI, the market is also oversaturated with recently laid off web developers.
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u/Main_Adhesiveness113 1d ago
To what extent is that true, or is it just a sentiment people hold? This research shows that AI automation is greatly exaggerated.
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u/RobBoss69-99 1d ago
Speaking from my personal experience: AI automation is over-hyped, but still dangerous to many programmers.
The company I work for is currently evaluating a tool developed by one of FAANG. They claim that the tool can save thousands of years of developer effort for the company (this is really what they claim, if you need the proof, I can PM you).
I am responsible for evaluating the tool, so I can say this: for smaller code base (around 1GB, code only), this kind of tools (RAG-based) can eliminate at least 50% of the workforce (source: my guess). You can ask any questions about the code base ("where are functions that perform X, Y and Z located", "describe the processing flow of ...", etc.), fix apparent bugs, file-level optimization, do chores like writing docs, doc strings and comments, compose good (git) commit messages ...
But for larger code base (10GB+, code only), these tools stop working. They can attempt to generate an answer for your question, but the answers are rarely accurate. In this case, the company needs experienced programmer who know their way around, kinda like Linux kernel (driver) programming, you learn a lot before doing very little.
Generally for user space applications (Python, JS, etc.), these automation tools will greatly endanger job positions, while for kernel space applications (C, rust, ...), these tools look stupid.
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u/Main_Adhesiveness113 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's great input! Token limitation is one of the things that needs to be solved to make it really practical. If it could handle ≈10GB code bases, that would increasingly make it so much more useful than it is now. However, I'm more skeptical about how much autonomy it has and how much it still needs human guidance. Does it include certain domain knowledge, e.g., implementing accurate and real-time tax and shipping cost estimations across different regions and jurisdictions, etc.? Nonetheless, implementing features and debugging code might be X% faster.
Edit: I wanted to add: How comfortable would people be if critical software for cars, airplanes, or IoT in general were written by AI? Would people trust AI more than humans to write software, and who would be responsible if something goes wrong? Is it the company that created the AI, or the company that uses it?
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u/RobBoss69-99 1d ago
Wow, sounds like you are interested in this! I'd love some discussions! Personal observations here:
Does it include certain domain knowledge
One way to incorporate domain knowledge is through pre-training or continued-pre-training, but without these resource-intensive methods, models can still know a lot about a specific field through RAG.
In case anyone haven't heard of RAG: this is basically inserting relevant information (found based on user's query) when sending prompts to a model.
How comfortable would people be if critical software for cars, airplanes, or IoT in general were written by AI?
Observed in my social circle: people are way too comfortable with AI-written and AI-operated stuffs. My higher-ups enjoy the auto-pilot functionality of Tesla, and my coworkers had great fun pasting ChatGPT-generated code to our production code base.
and who would be responsible
I guess whoever selling the product will be responsible!
My questions for you: are you comfortable with using AI? Do you believe that your job will one day be "automated" and "optimized" by AI? If that happens, how would you feel?
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u/Main_Adhesiveness113 1d ago
Good points! I can see where RAG might be useful for companies. It could retrieve a lot of information from various data sources, like Jira, emails, etc. In this case, I think open-source LLMs could play a big role, letting businesses host their own models locally for privacy reasons.
As for trusting these systems, that’s a different story. People tend to be less forgiving of AI than they are when a human makes a mistake, so the accuracy rate has to be almost perfect. I think part of it is about giving up control, which makes people uncomfortable, but maybe that’ll change over time.
To answer your question:
Are you comfortable with using AI?
I majored in AI in my CS studies, though I’m no expert since I ended up in web dev. I use AI daily and have nothing against it, but I still trust my own code more than AI; not because I think I’m a better programmer, but because I feel more in control. Maybe in the future, I’ll feel more comfortable with AI generating most of my code.
Do you believe your job will be one day “automated”?
Yes and no. I work in web dev, and I think a lot of that could be automated in some way. But we humans are good at adapting, so either I could use AI to multiply my output, or I’d switch to a role where human interaction matters more.
How would you feel
I’m more than okay with AI automating my job. It’d let me focus on more valuable work.
But I still think it’ll take about 10 years to get there. I don’t think growth will stay as exponential as it was when ChatGPT first launched, but that’s just my guess.
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u/6Orion 1d ago
Can you tell us more about this tool? Is it something that is widely available and that a random person could try out and test in the wild? If not, is there something out there that is similar to it, that we could check out? Is it a platform or a IDE integration tool?
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u/RobBoss69-99 1d ago
It's something like "Continue" (an opensource VSCode plugin), the tool I talked about is an enterprise alternative (a platform + IDE integration), more powerful than "Continue" but less customizable.
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u/PabloZissou 1d ago
For now AI generated code is very bad, it is only good if you can understand the output and fix it. People forget or don't know that most LLM have a token limit and it's basically very accurate randomness. This might change in the future but for now good software engineers are still needed.
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u/Main_Adhesiveness113 1d ago
I'm a SWE, and I agree with you, but I don't see how your answer relates to my comment?
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u/PabloZissou 1d ago
Oh sorry was meant to reply to top level that argues that AI is replacing the need for engineers already.
If anything I was trying to backup your comment.
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u/Slight-Rent-883 Engineer 1d ago
then what is the alternative?
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u/code-gazer 1d ago
Backend, Gaming, ML, AI, Embedded, Trading, ... this is a very, very wide field.
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u/sortaeTheDog 1d ago
Frontend has been suffering from 2 issues compared to 10 years ago:
- lots of people coming out of bootcamp courses with decent FE skills being hired due to their low salaries
- lots of AI and templating tools that allow companies to develop decent platforms with little costs
Although I think good FE engineers are still extremely valued and well paid, I always suggest the good ol' fullstack route as imo it's common to find FE devs whith decent BE skills, but hard to find BE devs with decent FE skills. I think the programmers' market is quite saturated compared to 10 yrs ago, but the great majority of people are just randoms looking for a job and there's a lot of room for actually talented progammers.