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There's another factor here I forgot to mention - web development, as a specialization, tends to be paid less and has a lower career ceiling in many companies t

by tibbar 2y ago

There's another factor here I forgot to mention - web development, as a specialization, tends to be paid less and has a lower career ceiling in many companies than backend and infra engineering. This is a personal observation on my part but I've seen many other people remark on this. True full stack engineering, I think, is reasonably safe from the robots at the moment. If someone likes building products, I'd basically recommend that they not go 100% full-bore on frontend engineering, definitely go for "full-stack", and accept that a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days. I would also recommend that they develop solid product management and UX skills.

eastbound 2y ago
Certainly. Front-end and UX skills go together. Front-end dev as a beginner → UX → PM later, would provide the same salary as back-end dev -> DevOps / K8s.
ativzzz 2y ago
> a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days If you're building CRUD yes. If you're doing anything remotely complex or novel, LLMs fall apart, much like they do for complex backend tasks. There's a lot of cool, highly customized stuff you can build with JS, and LLMs don't do a very good job at general problem solving. They're still helpful for writing small, specific functions, or providing high level guidance
dakiol 2y ago
Anecdotally, I work on backend/cloud and my senior frontend engineers do earn not as much as I do, but close… and their environments are always less stressful (major outages are not caused by frontends usually and when so, reverting to the last stable commit is enough since frontends are stateless; their toolset is narrower than mine, so yeah they need to jump between frontend frameworks but that’s fine… me in the meantime need to jump between backend frameworks, dbs, k8s, distributed system knowledge, unix tooling, OS/TCP/IP, etc)

by tibbar 2y ago

eastbound 2y ago

Certainly. Front-end and UX skills go together. Front-end dev as a beginner → UX → PM later, would provide the same salary as back-end dev -> DevOps / K8s.

ativzzz 2y ago

> a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days If you're building CRUD yes. If you're doing anything remotely complex or novel, LLMs fall apart, much like they do for complex backend tasks. There's a lot of cool, highly customized stuff you can build with JS, and LLMs don't do a very good job at general problem solving. They're still helpful for writing small, specific functions, or providing high level guidance

dakiol 2y ago

Anecdotally, I work on backend/cloud and my senior frontend engineers do earn not as much as I do, but close… and their environments are always less stressful (major outages are not caused by frontends usually and when so, reverting to the last stable commit is enough since frontends are stateless; their toolset is narrower than mine, so yeah they need to jump between frontend frameworks but that’s fine… me in the meantime need to jump between backend frameworks, dbs, k8s, distributed system knowledge, unix tooling, OS/TCP/IP, etc)