For Sr+ Engineers: Frontend, Backend, or Full-stack?
For the engineers that have been around a while, been successful in what they started with, and started to get more opportunities. How did you navigate yourself through what you wanted to get better at as your career progressed?
For example: I know some engineers who start in UI and then be moved to the backend because either that business' harder problems are in the backend and/or the manager thinks that is where the harder problems lie. (Seems to be an anitiquated belief amongst older tech managers that backend is inherently harder)
Or: You start on either end of the stack and move to being more "full stack" to make yourself theoretically more flexible and definitely more valuable to smaller companies that need breadth more than they need depth.
Finally: There's those that seem to go super deep in what they're doing. I kind of put library devs in this bucket due to how well they need to know their domain to build the tools that they build. However, there is just a different form of breadth that emerges there with needing to think through all the possible use cases of your library and how people will interpret it.
Anyways, I think this is a topic that a lot of engineers have to address as they mature and am just curious to hear how people approach this.
4 Replies
There are definitely more opportunities for work if you're full stack.
I've been pretty much exclusively frontend for the last 4 years, and it's killing me rn.
What is killing you about it? Just trouble with job searching given your focused experience?
Yep, for every 1 dedicated frontend role, there's probably 10-20 full stack roles.
I don't have enough full-stack experience on paper to get interviews for those roles, and when I'm asked about features that I've owned end to end, I have to talk about personal projects.
Also the backend often owns vital business logic, so getting further into backend will help you become more familear with how the business actually operates (what services are used, how data is structured/saved, etc.)
I'm having the exact same issue as @Mike rn. It's a rough market, especially for people that specialize.
It helps that it's getting easier to do fullstack in JS now though. Also, as you get more experience as a developer, you start focusing more on the product itself, rather than just on the code.
I would recommend building a base in one thing, and then just throwing yourself at as many problems as you can. Frontend/backend/whatever. The more skills you have, the more hireable you are.
Also as a non-US dev, it's especially hard getting a contractor job from US companies.