This post is very different from my usual technical content — it’s raw and frustrated, based on my personal job-hunting experience. If you’re a frontend dev, you might relate.
For the last 2–3 months, I’ve been trying to switch jobs. And after dozens of interviews, I’m done pretending everything is okay.
So here’s my honest, frustrated take on what’s wrong with tech interviews — especially for frontend developers in India.
I’ve been in the industry for over 4 years. I’ve done the whole frontend–backend dance. Built apps, fixed bugs, fought with legacy code, dealt with design handovers that made no sense, and shipped things under pressure that somehow still worked.
But I love frontend. That’s what I breathe. I like building clean UI, smooth animations, and fast and responsive designs. I know how to make a button feel right.
But the interviewers?
They don’t care.
“You applied for Angular dev, but let me grill you on Kafka…”
Every other job post screams:
We’re hiring a frontend Angular developer.
And yet, the interviews are like:
- “How would you optimize a MongoDB query?”
- “Explain an event-driven system using Kafka.”
- “Explain how you’d build microservices.”
Excuse me? Did I miss the part where this turned into a backend SDE-2 round?
No one’s asking:
How would you optimize FCP or LCP?
How do you handle memory leaks in Angular?
Can you build a Canvas animation from scratch?
But hey, sure, let’s test me on database indexing strategies. Because apparently, writing frontend isn’t “real development” unless you’re also knee-deep in SQL joins.
“Bro, you should know full stack.”
No.
I applied for frontend, and that’s what I want to do.
Not because I can’t write backend — I can. But because I don’t want to. I like the challenge of making things feel fast, look clean, and work across a million devices. I love sweating over that last frame drop on an animation. I enjoy figuring out why a layout breaks on an iPad Mini Gen 5.
But companies here?
They don’t want frontend devs.
They want backend devs who also happen to know HTML.
“Backend is harder, bro.”
Yeah? Then why does your blazing fast API still result in a UI that takes 4 seconds to update?
Have you ever debugged a performance issue caused by a bloated table component with 100 columns and an infinite scroll that crashes on Safari Mobile?
Have you ever spent hours shaving milliseconds off paint timings just so your app feels usable on a budget Android phone?
Backend is hard, sure.
But don’t pretend frontend is just “putting buttons on a page.”
Frontend is performance, responsiveness, accessibility, UX, and design — all tangled together with business logic, browser quirks, and user expectations.
“If you can’t do it, I’ll throw it in a cursor.”
I was debugging a UI animation bug. It was messy and took time. A senior dev (backend, obviously) said:
“If you can’t fix it, give it to me — I’ll just throw it in a cursor.”
Honestly?
Unless it’s some heavy backend logic, sure — I can tell the cursor to do some x-y calculation, maybe write an update query, and get it over with. That’s easy.
But how the hell do you tell a cursor about the animation playing in your head?
How do you explain easing curves, scroll acceleration, responsiveness across devices, or the GPU render pipeline… to a cursor?
This is exactly the problem — treating frontend like it’s something you can brute force with database logic.
Final Thought: Let Me Do What I’m Good At
I’m not asking for much.
If the JD says “Frontend Developer,” stop trying to test me like I’m applying for a backend-heavy full-stack role.
I’ll happily say “I don’t know” when you throw backend problems at me — not because I’m dumb, but because I’m not applying to solve those problems.
Let frontend devs be frontend devs.
- Stop wasting our time.
- Stop disrespecting the craft.
- And maybe, just maybe, let us do the work we actually love.
Ayush Maurya
Frontend Engineer. Angular, React, WebGL, and way too much patience for interviews that don’t know what they’re hiring for.
Top comments (5)
I once was in a company that out-sourced it's Development to an off-shore agency. Everyone in this agency identified as "full stack".
The Frontend was a total mess, really inconsistent, various competing technologies (Sass and LESS), bloated, inaccessible and looked really bad - the attention to detail and Design polish just wasn't there.
We terminated this contract with this provider shortly after.
It's rooted in biggest systemic problems. There's a good blog post about this here.
I'm not hating, but u need to also work with them it can't just be Not interested because u ask me some backend questions. Also Frontend most of these vibe coding applications can do, I get it not perfect, but how may vibe coding can do backend? I am a backend dev and the truth is the market is getting tougher, so maybe have a bit of flexibility and i understand its Front end job, however some jobs require more of a hybrid role.
yeah exactly you're right .They make us feel inadequate and we are never enough.
Even if you're a AI they still criticize you
They don't pay any attention to positive things
I'm feeling with you
L-o-l