Why so many UI front end engineers are loosing jobs?

Something is not right in the world of UI / Front End / Full stack Engineering .. 

I got another call from an alumni's friend getting laid off as front end / full stack dev..

Just to give you numbers 

We have over 340+ candidates that we have helped get jobs in the last 5 years . 

6 got laid off since Jan 1

All of them are front end / full stack /react / UI /UX folks except one who is a software tester ..

None of our data , PM , BA got laid off ..

Based on several conversations I had , there  might be few reasons  biggest one being 

Rise of platforms such as salesforce /others

When you are  building or migrating to  new app or platform , 

You have 2 choices, 

Build a custom one which means building the entire infra from front end/ back end / devops / cloud / testing /Security/Accessibility and whole  bunch of stuff etc  ( You can also use low code / no code to build such as Appian ) . 

Or 

Use salesforce or similar cloud based platform. With few customizations , you are up and running in a few weeks, at max a few months .

Previously most of the customers' requirements were so niche that there was no choice but to build custom apps . 

But newer purpose-built clouds such as marketing, insurance , finance have reduced friction ..

Whatever you need, there is a cloud for that . 

Plus I know 
From my experience, most of the custom stuff that is built by non tech companies works like crap. I was one of those non tech engineers  building software, I will never use what I build  :) . 




But even platforms like salesforce cannot provide full functionality for every business. 

What they have are escape hatches to include any third party / custom functionality to include your own versions. If you are still missing the functionality there are thousands of apps on AppStore /Google Cloud / Salesforce appexchange

Role of UI / UX has changed , they now should learn to work on integrations and making different systems talk to each other . Insteading of building from ground up , they need fill in for missing functionality 

Finally, there is still huge demand for UI engineers but companies need candidates who are exceptional 

For example , Can you build functionality like Canva . Even canva founders waited few years to find talent that can pull of that kind of engineering feat. 


In short , companies need UI talent that will obliterate the need of UI Engineers. Hmm ..Kind of shooting youself in foot.

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