honestdeveloper

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of respect and career ceiling, the worst thing about frontend is how quickly things change and knowledge is considered out of date, so there's very little stability.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but now things have stabilized such that it seems that companies seem super picky in wanting their specific slightly outdated enterprise-y tech stack.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.

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.

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)

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.

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.