Job requirements have gotten out of control (FE engineer)

I have been working since 2012, and I’ve been a senior engineer since roughly 2017. I specialize in frontend.

I remembered up until about 2021, it was very much just a normal 9-5 job, with some ebbs and flows. Some days you’d work a little more, others a little less. Nowadays, I feel like work is considered to be a 24/7 thing. I worked at one company where they’d frequently request that I worked at 2AM (to sync up with coworkers in Nepal), another where they told me not to go to the gym because I wouldn’t have my phone and they wanted me to be available all the time

The scope has gotten out of control. I worked at a big company, and I remember I did maybe one feature on the frontend the entire time I worked there. I spent the overwhelming majority of my time doing tasks that were unrelated to my skillset, while being expected to perform as well as someone who had 10+ years of experience in that thing. I’ve never written ruby, but I was told at one job to write an entire feature in ruby in ~3 days

Frontend engineering in general feels like a particularly annoying field. They’re always cutting back on engineers, and frontends are often the last to be hired and the first to be let go. What this tangibly means is that you have backend engineers writing frontend code most of the time. To be VERY blunt here, they usually lack the domain knowledge to do a lot of the work in a sustainable way. At this point, it feels like 95% of my job is just testing a very flakey frontend. I’m sure backend engineers deal with tech debt, but it feels like the entire frontend is tech debt because people just get it done as fast as possible and doesn’t take it seriously or see it as inherently lesser than backend and therefore not worth their attention

What this means is I’m usually thrown into an environment where the frontend is unmanageable slop. Everyone is afraid to touch it. Managers usually just respond to friction, and they’re also way too overwhelmed, so they just blame the FE engineer and fire them when things take a long time.

Then AI comes along and makes this waaaay worse. “I have never written ruby :\” “just use claude”, okay but how will I confirm my fixes actually work? You want me to just throw slop at the wall and hope it sticks? But then that’s gonna make a problem for you down the road, are you sure you want that? Then I remember everyone is already working at 110% capacity so they don’t even have the bandwidth to think about that, it’s all basically just about surviving this week

With constant layoffs and firings, it feels like everyone is at each other throats because they don’t want to be the one to be kicked. There’s some that seem to be happy about the idea of people being kicked because AI is “good enough” and they don’t wanna deal with another person.

Of course, it’s been causing extreme apathy around the board. Is this the right tool for the job? Who gives a shit, who will care? They’ll only care that I get it out the door in the least amount of time possible

I’m just so sick of it at this point, the stress is constantly through the roof and burnout seems incredibly common