u/Trungks_Ousi

My worst nightmare has come true; finally at the crossroads

The organization I work for recently hit a massive setback. The writing is on the wall: we have about 5-6 months to turn things around, or the layoffs are going to start.

But instead of tightening up, absolute madness has taken over.

Our CTO has suddenly granted full frontend codebase access to everyone in the office. People from the Marketing and Design teams are literally pushing code straight to PROD.All using claude. It is humiliating to watch.

To make matters worse, the CTO has openly started asking non-engineers to take over frontend tasks, brushing it off as just "a few lines of HTML-CSS-JS."

I've been in this industry for near 6-7 years, and I feel like this is a glaring sign that the frontend team is going to be the first one to the slaughterhouse when the time comes.

I need a reality check from the community:

  1. Is this kind of "cross-team" cowboy coding happening anywhere else, or is my CTO losing his mind?
  2. What should be my next move here?
  3. Should I take this as a sign to pivot to Full-Stack, or abandon ship entirely?

TL;DR: Company has a 6-month runway before layoffs. CTO panicked, gave marketing/design direct access to push frontend code to PROD, and called our jobs "just a few lines of HTML/CSS." Trying to figure out if I need to pivot to full-stack or just run.

reddit.com
u/Trungks_Ousi — 16 hours ago

I’m a 30-year-old frontend developer with 5 years of experience. Most of my work has been in Angular + PHP, I’m comfortable with React, and I’ve built a few small full-stack side projects using Express.js just for practice.
Like many of you, I’m watching the AI wave and the crazy job-market uncertainty and I’m starting to feel lost. Frontend roles (especially Angular/PHP) already feel like they’re shrinking or getting heavily commoditized. I know the only real option is to upskill seriously, but I’m stuck between two paths and would love your honest opinions:

  1. Go the Backend route,grind LeetCode-style DSA + algorithms, learn Node.js deeper (or maybe Java/Spring or .NET), and become a solid full-stack/backend engineer.
  2. Dive into AI Engineering,this one I know almost nothing about. I keep seeing posts about “AI Engineer” roles but I have zero idea what the actual day-to-day work or required skill-set looks like for someone coming from a traditional web-dev background.
    My questions for you:
    • Which path makes more sense in 2026–2027 for someone with my exact background?
    • What are the realistic timelines and roadmaps for each?
    • Is AI Engineering actually accessible without a CS master’s or heavy math background, or is it mostly hype right now?
    • Any other directions I should consider (DevOps, low-code platforms, product engineering, etc.)?
    I’m willing to put in 6–12 months of serious focused learning, but I don’t want to waste time chasing something that might be saturated or overhyped.
    Would really appreciate brutal honesty + any resources/roadmaps that helped people in similar situations. Thank you in advance!
reddit.com
u/Trungks_Ousi — 17 days ago