I think this has been a huge failing of our industry of late. The rise of the "fullstack developer" has mostly reduced quality across the board. When you hire

I think this has been a huge failing of our industry of late. The rise of the "fullstack developer" has mostly reduced quality across the board. When you hire a "fullstack developer with 5 years experience" you aren't getting someone who is as good as a frontend developer with 5 years AND a backend developer with 5 years but someone that adds up to 5 years split between those 2 endeavors but probably with less depth as a result of switching. (as a side note I also think it's contributed to developer title inflation) Learning a new language and its tooling is comparatively easy compared to learning the required domain knowledge to be effective in a new area. i.e transition from frontend -> backend or visa versa has very little to do with the language or tooling. Your average frontend dev doesn't know squat about RDBMS schema design or query optimisation, probably aren't familar with backend observability patterns like logging, metrics and tracing, most likely have very little experience thinking about consistency and concurrency in distributed systems, etc, etc. Just like the backend dev is going to struggle with the constraints of working in a frontend context, understanding UI interactions, optimizing for browser paint performance, dealing with layout and responsiveness, etc. Meanwhile if you know say Java and some scripting language, say Python and you end up a new job doing backend in JS it's not going to take long for you to pick up JS and hit the ground running because you are going to encounter exactly the same stuff just different syntax and runtime. Backend being substantially divorced from frontend isn't a bad thing, it's generally a good thing that results in nice clean separation of concerns and healthy push-pull in design decisions about where certain logic and responsibilities should lie etc.