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> Frontend devs frequently make more than backend devs, and have many more job opportunities to choose from. Out of curiosity, how true is this statement? I he

> Frontend devs frequently make more than backend devs, and have many more job opportunities to choose from. Out of curiosity, how true is this statement? I hear from my friends that most frontend devs start with higher salary, but have a hard time climbing the corporate ladder, especially if the frontend is not the core competency of the company. I wonder which one is a more accurate depiction of reality.

nostrademons 11y ago
Both statements are true. The market for frontend devs is both competitive and very liquid: there are many job opportunities and many frontend developers. As a result, starting salaries tend to be high, and you can very quickly "rise to what you're worth": if you don't like your boss or your company is underpaying you, jump ship. However, frontend tech tends to expire every 5 years. This is part of the reason why starting salaries are high: junior developers can compete effectively with senior ones. If you go backend, you tend to amass a steady stream of domain & infrastructural knowledge about the company which makes you significantly more valuable to them over time. Raises and promotions follow, even if that knowledge is of limited usefulness on the open market. Whether you'd prefer one or the other partially depends on how you would like to manage your career. The OP in this subthread indicates that he's drawn to the craftsmanship, the idea of steadily making something better over time, and this style tends to suit backend dev better. I tend to be drawn toward discovery, the process of finding loopholes & gaps in the market and filling them with new solutions, so for me frontend & entrepreneurship is more useful. (Frontend dev tends to be a more useful skill for founders, because almost every startup needs an appealing frontend but most can get by with a half-assed backend until they hire more engineers. Witness DropBox vs. Tarsnap - they came out at the same time and both use AWS for storage, but DropBox built a beautiful frontend and a minimally-functional backend, while Tarsnap barely built a frontend at all but has the most sophisticated secure backend I've seen in a product.) For me, the idea of climbing the corporate ladder sounds like hell, while to other engineers on this site, the idea of retraining in a different technology every 5 years probably sounds like hell.

nostrademons 11y ago

Both statements are true. The market for frontend devs is both competitive and very liquid: there are many job opportunities and many frontend developers. As a result, starting salaries tend to be high, and you can very quickly "rise to what you're worth": if you don't like your boss or your company is underpaying you, jump ship. However, frontend tech tends to expire every 5 years. This is part of the reason why starting salaries are high: junior developers can compete effectively with senior ones. If you go backend, you tend to amass a steady stream of domain & infrastructural knowledge about the company which makes you significantly more valuable to them over time. Raises and promotions follow, even if that knowledge is of limited usefulness on the open market. Whether you'd prefer one or the other partially depends on how you would like to manage your career. The OP in this subthread indicates that he's drawn to the craftsmanship, the idea of steadily making something better over time, and this style tends to suit backend dev better. I tend to be drawn toward discovery, the process of finding loopholes & gaps in the market and filling them with new solutions, so for me frontend & entrepreneurship is more useful. (Frontend dev tends to be a more useful skill for founders, because almost every startup needs an appealing frontend but most can get by with a half-assed backend until they hire more engineers. Witness DropBox vs. Tarsnap - they came out at the same time and both use AWS for storage, but DropBox built a beautiful frontend and a minimally-functional backend, while Tarsnap barely built a frontend at all but has the most sophisticated secure backend I've seen in a product.) For me, the idea of climbing the corporate ladder sounds like hell, while to other engineers on this site, the idea of retraining in a different technology every 5 years probably sounds like hell.