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According to his tweet [1], there is a separate hiring track for front end engineers that does not include that much algorithmic knowledge. I was surprised too.

[1] https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1078658656344903683?s...

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Facebook can afford (nay, NEEDS) to rise to that level of specialization. But that's only going to be true at the level of a megacorp, like Facebook, or Google, or Microsoft.

For even moderately sized companies, someone with wider knowledge will fare better, because such companies aren't going to spend $500k/yr on someone who doesn't know algorithms (or on someone who ONLY knows algorithms). The marginal cost to Facebook is near zero, the marginal cost to a smaller company certainly is not.

To be clear, once you get in, there is no actual distinction. People can choose any team, and "front end" people sometimes work on the backend or mobile or services or IDE or a compiler, etc. We try to hire generalists.

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