Ask HN: Is front end a dead-end career track?

>> Seems that frontend is seen as second-tier engineering and isn't really respected.

At the places I've worked, it's because that's where the majority of the beginners are, and lots of mistakes are made there. But there are some excellent FE developers, who also know other technologies and are excited about them. Those are the ones I want to hire!

I've also seen lots of FE out-sourced to small companies all over the world. They work fast and efficiently, and their engineers are usually contracted for a limited time.

>> or at worst full-stack

What's wrong with full-stack? :(

Most beginners being in frontend is a reflection of frontend not being respected. If frontend was more respected, then more beginners would be hired into backend.

Other than the lack of respect and career ceiling, the worst thing about frontend is how quickly things change and knowledge is considered out of date, so there's very little stability.

Also frontend is in a weird stop right now where enterprise frontends have stabilized on React, redux-toolkit, and likely some styled-components like CSS library - but personally I much prefer Zustand for state management and Tailwind (which to a traditionalist will look like sacrilege at first glance). In this last interview I was rejected from I was given redux coding challenges, which I completed, but since I stopped using redux many years ago maybe I wasn't as fast as they were expecting. I guess what I'm saying is in the past it was enough to have worked with any UI library like React, Angular, VueJS, etc. and be generally sharp, but now things have stabilized such that it seems that companies seem super picky in wanting their specific slightly outdated enterprise-y tech stack. Which I mean if that's your standard, fine, but they don't at all seem knowledgeable or interested in discussing alternatives (in total contrast to when I interview in which it's what I'm way more interested in discussing in an interview than some lame coding exercise that says practically nothing about the candidate).

You're prob right on the outsourcing, and that's even more signal to gtfo of frontend as that just signals increased competition, lower compensation, and is a reflection of frontend's second-tier status.

I love full-stack. I just keep interviewing at companies that say they're hiring for both backend and frontend, but regardless of what I say I'm interested in they shove me down their frontend pipeline.

>> frontend not being respected

Eh... maybe at AAGMM, but PEOPLE can earn respect, regardless of the job title. If the people in the company don't respect a person, then is it worth working there?

I think another reason why it feels like there are much more beginners in frontend than backend is that the ecosystem moves much quicker and there aren't any long-term established frameworks/patterns yet. You can't build as much experience on something that's constantly a moving target. (browsers themselves move and change what patterns can be built and whether the existing patterns are worth pursuing vs starting over)

In constrast, on backend, experience with an MVC framework and SQL database from 10 years ago (even 20 for databases) is just as current today. The APIs might change superficially but the general pattern is the same.

> Thing is I never cared about frontend vs. backend, I just liked building things and solving problems. But the elitism in this industry and these absurd interview processes with these robotic multi-hour coding challenges and no feedback make me can't wait to leave this damn industry so I can build whatever the hell I want without having to worry if some elitist snob considers it "real engineering".

Unfortunately, it has been completely ruined thanks to Leetcode and interviewing has now been turned into an entire industry which not even the interviewers themselves can solve the questions they are asking for without Googling or ChatGPT.

I don't think there is a fix nor will it change, but you might as well go for self-employment, which is much better than going through the interview madness game.

> Please do let me know if I'm wrong in my analysis and conclusions, and would love to hear any advice on how to escape this frontend ceiling treadmill.

You are spot on.

The pontification in this industry has been quite visible in the past few years. Now that the cheap easy money and access to capital is gone, the interview process is now a complete slot machine game which there are lots of losers and whoever knows the owner of the casino can rig the game so that they win at every spin.

Honestly I think there needs to be legislation introduced to make it mandatory for employers to provide feedback if the employee has invested hours into the interview process, while in exchange the employer gets legal immunity for their feedback. It's so demoralizing going through hours of take-home tests and coding challenges, passing all the questions, and still getting rejected with zero feedback.

And yea these interviews are so ridiculous I really wonder what the hell these interviewers' actual goals are with these interviews. They all brag about only hiring the smartest people. A part of me feels like they're just fishing for ideas and stroking their own ego. These coding challenges I'm getting are often so stupid and almost insulting.

Also these coding challenges in general are way overemphasized. You can either code or you can't, and it doesn't take much time to learn one's tech stack as long as one is familiar with something similar. What matters way more is one's knowledge of things like design patterns, architecture, and the non-technicals like how is it working with this person, what motivates them, are they a good person, etc. If I'm hiring someone for my startup and only have an hour of their time, no way I'm wasting that on some stupid coding challenge. The early seed stage companies and agencies tend to not waste time with that crap, it's the more established companies with bored engineering managers trying to justify their own existence and foster a culture of "rockstar" engineers that waste your time with these asinine take-home tests and robotic coding interviews only to reject you even after completing it and ghost you on any feedback. Prob the same engineering managers hiring scrum consultants.

What's funny is I remember back when I worked in the corporate world we had some initial take-home test (not my decision, if it were up to me we'd only have that for juniors), but if the candidate was deemed too qualified (ie. the CTO knew them) they'd get to skip it. It's like - you've got 5-10 years of experience building complex stuff? Bend over and take our take-home coding test, code monkey. You're a top-tier "real" engineer? We won't insult you by making you do this low level plebian work, that's for the code monkeys (who will bring you your coffee in a sec)

If the kind of value you want to receive is not coming to you I'd think in two ways:

1. Reflecting in what would be missing on how are you selling yourself so you can reposition the product of you as frontend software engineer. Are you making it easy enough to perceive that is a great opportunity to have you in an engineering team? What do you have in your control right now that can make that perception more overt?

2. Be the CTO of a x10 product (niche would be easier), raise a seed round with a co-founder and show the kind of value you were always talking about.

Both paths needs you resisting to become resentful (making neuroticism go up) because people will sense the negative vibe from miles away and intuitively reject being close to you even if they don't understand the details of why (just general impression).

PS: I'm a fullstack with more time spent in backends, and when I have to show a portfolio it's almost always the frontend that can be displayed to cause some kind of quick fast good impression. Backend stuff is always harder to show/prove.

Well my challenge right now is I'm getting rejected after coding challenges (most recently a 4 hour coding challenge final interview and a 1 hour take-home test + 1 hour coding challenge), but I have no idea why I'm getting rejected because I'm completing the (trivial) problems asked of me and getting zero meaningful feedback (one company just said "lacked attention to detail" without being specific about anything, while the other ghosted me). In the past I always knew when I'd failed a coding challenge, but now I have no idea why I'm being rejected.

I've done a lot of work that I think qualifies me for these jobs and have a public portfolio with side projects that took hundreds of hours and I think involve a fair amount of complexity, but I'm getting the impression that nobody really takes any of it seriously because they don't have thousands of users and I didn't scale a bunch of distributed servers to serve millions of requests per second in throughputs for live users. I want to keep working on them and hopefully be able to monetize them because I think these tools I'm building could potentially be successful with more work - but then a part of me feels like I should be working on something more "technically impressive" because interviewers don't seem to be impressed at all about your "CRUD" web app unless it's got a lot of traction (though if my apps had that traction, why the hell would I even be interviewing lol).

Good point on it being harder to showcase backend work - that actually does make me feel a little better. Backend work I think needs to be accompanied by an article explaining all the technical challenges, at which point I think many will still consider it more respectable than typical frontend work even if the former isn't any more challenging than the latter.

I'm also full stack btw, just more confident in my frontend because my "big company" experience was on the frontend. I redid my resume today. Will see what I can do to make myself more attractive. I never had any trouble finding work in the past, so I've been surprised at how much more difficult it has been this year.

Yes, when you show a project, I don't want (nor have time) to think how you put something together. You need to show me. Call out a particular challenge and how you solved it is VERY interesting to me.

Also, those coding challenges are a numbers game. Sometimes you get a good coding question, other times there's a dumb trick that you forgot about and the interviewer didn't like your choice of how you named your function.

When I give live coding interviews, I don't really care about how well you code (somewhat), I want you to work with me and ask questions.

I give bonus points for talking about telemetry, error handling, and cache improvements (etc).

"Stupid fish, can't climb a tree"

Far from dead-end, I think front end is a much more dynamic field that offers much more career options. You are essentially translating extraordinarily complicated engineering solutions and translating them into human design. This makes you valuable in many, many more fields because the skills you need are of broader use.

Front end people rise the ranks all of the time, but usually not through engineering departments. Because it's such a human-oriented skill, your career ceiling is determined by your interpersonal skills. I know lots of frontend engineers who have risen to prominence through Consulting, UX, Marketing, etc.

I think your current benchmark is wrong - you probably shouldn't care about being the king of the greybeards.

I'd love to hear more about the frontend people who excelled in consulting, as being independent / my own boss would be my ideal path.

I've done my share of contracting, but unfortunately as I've gotten more experience, I haven't found it any easier to find work (could be the market), and wages haven't gone up at all. It seems like no one wants to pay above $100/hr for frontend contract work and I was making that almost 5 years ago.

Prob hurts a lot that I've been remote for the last 5 years, and thus haven't built much of a network.

So, front end is insanely valuable for user-centric services. Just think of the number of successful services/applications that are no more than very refined UIs on top of boring backend technology. If you want to get 1M active users, a whiz-bang front-end on top of a PHP server is more likely to get you there than the inverse.

In an agency setting, oftentimes you have no choice in the backend tech you have to work with. You usually sit with clients and work with then on how to design and implement the best possible experience with what they have. But your value is not in how marketable your particular technical depth is - good decision making and bedside manner with clients are what you make money off of.

So the easy path is: work within an agency -> develop a body of client work -> leverage your body of work and connections to start your own (smaller) agency. Or, even start in a corporate job where they prioritize frontend work.

But as some general career advice, if you treat your own skillset as a commodity, markets will happily treat it as one.

> Seems that frontend is seen as second-tier engineering and isn't really respected

Frontend is largely a solved problem. It's offloaded to frameworks like Bootstrap and countless others. In 2023 you really should not be hand-crafting your own theme, unless you really enjoying doing that and enjoy the challenge of it.

This shows a quite limited understanding of what FE development (and product design) entails these days. But, it's sort of true if you don't build anything interesting.

Same applies to every other component of a "not interesting product" btw, if all you need is a DB with some crud endpoints you can get great solutions without writing any backend code.

I think the "disrespect" is largely a left over from the time when FE was seen as styling with a little bit JS, it's a different world right now.

I don't think it's as prevalent anymore, plenty of BE devs moving towards FE, plenty of respect as well, and any decent organization realises the importance of FE in actually delivering anything.

This comment is exactly what I'm talking about!

First off - nobody uses Bootstrap anymore, and frontend is way more than just CSS. Just from the comment I can infer that you probably know very little about frontend, yet have the confidence to disparage frontend as a "solved problem". Your comment is a perfect example of the lack of respect towards frontend.

Let me ask you, what in software engineering isn't already a solved problem?

I'm glad you used that wording, because it seems that the most optimal way to work in this industry is to work on those problems that aren't considered already solved. I think that very very few of the problems that engineers work on haven't already been solved. But perhaps that's one lens to look at things in order to decide what kind of work has the highest ROI in working on. Clearly from a tech career perspective it's not frontend.

Don't get discouraged, FE is amazing, and it's only getting better imo. It's just a small number of grumpy developers stuck in the past who don't get it, just see them for what they are, wrong and ignorant.

The most optimal way to work in this industry is to deliver great working products. No one can argue with results.

If you want to strengthen your position, which is always a great idea, you can go many directions: FE + App development (react native for example), FE + backend, FE + design, FE + product, any pairing is super valuable.

Also don't underestimate the power of frontend in an organization, it's where everything comes together, its where the rubber meets the road. It's where backend and design become an actual product, it's what your clients actually see, it's what business people demo and sell.

If you do it well and take control, you can be the glue in an organization and influence literally everything.

I don't believe "engineering" as a full-time employee is a good career track and this is the beginning of the end. Look at houses - when you hire builders to build a house, do you keep paying the builders once the house is built and you live in it? No. You may occasionally need someone for maintenance, but you will never need the same amount of people that were required to initially build the house.

Engineering (whether FE or BE) exists to solve a business problem and drive profit. The free VC money raining down in the last decade made some people forget that and even created perverse incentives where complexity was sometimes seen as an asset (to solicit more VC money) - it made it possible (and normal) to keep the "builders" around and intentionally make the house more and more complex so it's intentionally never finished and the builders have a justification to remain there and pocket part of said VC money.

The free VC money has now dried up. Businesses are back at chasing profit (those who can't will go out of business altogether) and are cutting back anything they can. All the "builders" were suddenly let go and the FE market is now saturated, which is why you're seeing so many issues with finding a role (the leetcode thing is just a symptom of this problem - LC gives them a solution to filter through the hundreds of resumes they're getting - it's not a good solution, but it's cheaper than manual review). Your issues with job search have little to do with "respect" and more with the market being saturated. The Leetcode test you said you completed successfully in another comment and then got ghosted? Someone else completed it just as well, but was a better talker (or bullshitter) during the actual interview.

The frontend market might be the first hit, but eventually the same will apply to other verticals. I suspect cloud-focused DevOps might be the next hit as businesses finally get tired of paying 100x margins into Jeff Bezos' pocket. Retraining to backend or whatever field you feel is more respected now might buy you some time but ultimately the same outcome will happen.

This doesn't mean frontend experience isn't valuable, but you should stop seeing it as "frontend" vs "backend" and start seeing it in terms of what business value you can contribute because that's ultimately the only thing businesses want to be paying for. A lot of solutions however definitely will include a backend component so gaining some experience there would be beneficial and would put you in a good position to deliver end-to-end solutions.

> Talk about scaling distributed systems, Kubernetes, and writing C and that's seen as legitimate, respectable work.

Only the last one.