Companies in the UK and US thought it would be cost effective to outsource engineering overseas?
Remember when the same companies then went on a massive hiring spree, to get inland engineers to fix and refactor said outsourced work?
Vibe coding and AI driven layoffs; just saying 🤷♂️
Hang in there y’all, maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel 🤞
Back story for context… 25 years as a web developer, started out in web design and then migrated to front end development (think IE6, CSS, JQuery, shims etc). Designing and building brochure and e-commerce frontends.
I then moved into full stack as WordPress became the dominant platform partnering. Working with design agencies as a self employed turn-key solution, building both the frontend and backend from supplied PSD visuals (oh how times have changed). This was from around 2011
Then came the adoption of React, Angular and Vue and at the time many companies were adopting these alongside in house design systems and component libraries. With a huge amount of experience in semantic, accessible markup, real css / scss skills, and a background in design - it was an opportunity to move into this domain. This was around 2017
Fast forward nearly ten years and the industry had changed a lot, and regrettably: I haven’t. I was able to sustain employment working for companies as a specialist in my domain, assisting product and design to build agnostic UI using component driven development and atomic design principles. Pixel perfect translation, accessibility, responsiveness and a great developer experience was what I was known for. Storybook was my bread and butter, I never actually worked within the main application my UI was being deployed within, instead engineering, testing and documenting components exclusively in storybook. Other engineers would consume my components within the application and take ownership of state integration and data fetching.
Here is the issue, I’ve been out of work for just over two years, the market doesn’t help (I’m based in the UK), and neither does the niche area I’ve specialised in. Most interviews advertise for frontend - my CV states “UI engineer”, and although I get an interview, it soon becomes apparent the skills gap for everything outside of my domain (state management, frameworks, etc) are all lacking. On top of that, AI is really closing the gap on my core skills; with some steering and a good model, it’s very capable of replacing me.
I need to pivot, not sure where though and that’s for me to explore. I’m 45 and nowhere near retirement- I have to sustain an income, but have been fortunate to earn well and within the next couple of years can maintain a comfortable lifestyle on a much lower income.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has experienced what I’m going through and what you’ve done to remain relevant- even if it’s leaving engineering all together.
Thanks 🙏🏼
We need to talk about the state of SE interview take-home tests, specifically the unrealistic expectations and contradictions that so often accompany these.
For context: I'm a front end engineer with 25 years experience; I'm attempting to land a job, in the worst market I've ever seen. I've been fortunate enough to progress through to the penultimate round; I have to complete a take home assignment, if satisfactory I'll be invited to their offices to discuss this assignment and attend a final cultural fit interview. Note this take home assignment comes off the back of a two hour live coding session interview (which was dreadful for the ADHD brain).
Historically, it's at this point where things go to shit, have identified the main stressors as:
- ambiguous requirements
- inadequate timeframes
- emphasis on ensuring your submission presents you at your best when there's so much contradiction between expectation and allotted time
I'm forever stuck in a constant loop of overwhelm; trying to find a balance between delivering the assignment within the specified timeframe, whilst ensuring I have demonstrated my capabilities as best I can.
I've currently been tasked with building a movie list tracker, core requirements are:
- A front end web application that runs entirely client side
- Allows a user to search the open movie database API for movies to add to either a watchlist or watched list
- Allows a user to remove movies from either list
- Persistence of this list using the browser local storage API
I've been told I will be assessed on:
- Code quality — component structure, separation of concerns, readability
- State management — how you model and handle data flow across the app
- UI & design — does it feel considered and polished, even if simple
On receipt of the handover task:
- There is no UI design provided, it is expected that the candidate produces this
- There is no environment set up; it is expected that the candidate chooses a stack and set this environment up from scratch
The brief mentions that the candidate should spend no more than two hours on this task and can use AI if they wish.
Besides just throwing all of this Gemini and vibe coding (which would not demonstrate my abilities rather well), I'm totally overwhelmed as to how I can design an interface, plan the architecture and build the application, then document my process - all within two hours. I was considering using Claude code, but even then: just the planning and UI design would go far beyond the two hours I'm allowed to work on this
Interested to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences and how they've tackled it. Also open to suggestions in terms of how to approach this take home.
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Update:
For those that are interested, here's the Notion brief and unless I'm missing something it appears they are expecting UI Design, architecture and implementation of the entire application - in a 2 hour window.
This is either incredibly naive from whomever signed this assignment off, or (as one commenter mentioned): intended to allow the candidate to prioritise and compromise. If the latter, if would be great for this to be explicitly mentioned.